Moonlight on Butternut Lake Page 2

  “I won’t go back there,” he said now.

  “Then make this work,” Allie said, almost pleadingly. “It’s only for three months, okay? After that, hopefully, you’ll be ready to live on your own again. In the meantime, just . . . just be nice to this woman. Her name is Mila. Mila Jones. And, for some reason, she wants to spend the summer two hundred and forty miles from her home in the Twin Cities. And, not only that, but she comes highly recommended from the woman who owns the agency in Minneapolis. So please, Reid. Please try.”

  He looked at Allie. She looked hopeful. Hopeful and trusting. But more than that, he thought, she looked tired. And it made him feel guilty. Paired with the arrival of a new baby, his accident, he knew, had been a lot for Allie and Walker to handle. Not that they ever complained about it. They didn’t. They left the complaining to him.

  “All right, I’ll try,” he said finally, forcing himself to smile one of his increasingly rare smiles. “This time, I’ll really try.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Mila had been waiting in the bus shelter for five minutes when a pickup truck finally rumbled into view. She assumed it was there for her. She hadn’t seen any other traffic on the road since she’d gotten off the bus. Still, she waited, warily, under the shelter roof until the driver, a man, pulled up, got out, and came around to her side of the truck.

  “Ms. Jones?” he asked.

  “That’s right,” she said, taking an instinctive step back.

  “Mila Jones,” he clarified. “From Caring Home Care?”

  She nodded anxiously. “Is there . . . is there something wrong?”

  He shook his head. “No, there’s nothing wrong. I’m just surprised. You seem . . . younger, somehow, than I expected you to be.”

  “I’m twenty-five,” Mila said, hoping her youthfulness wasn’t a problem. If it was, there was nothing she could do about it.

  But in the next moment, the man shrugged and smiled. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be rude. And I already knew you were twenty-five. It was in the fax the agency sent. By the way, I’m Walker Ford,” he added, holding out his hand. “And it goes without saying that you can call me Walker.”

  “Okay,” Mila said, tentatively, looking at his outstretched hand. He wants you to shake it, she told herself. And she did shake it, but because she’d hesitated a moment too long in doing so, he looked at her a little more closely, something she didn’t especially want him to do.

  In the next moment, though, the handshake was over, and Walker was picking up her suitcase and opening the pickup truck’s back door. “Is this it?” he asked, setting the suitcase on the floor of the backseat.

  “That’s it,” Mila said. “I’m a light packer, I guess.”

  And if Walker Ford thought there was anything strange about her bringing a single suitcase for an entire summer, he didn’t say so. He only shut the back door and opened the front passenger door, looking expectantly at Mila.

  But again, she hesitated. Does he want me to ride up front with him? she wondered anxiously. But of course he did. Where else would he want her to ride? In the backseat? No. This wasn’t a taxi, or a limousine service.

  So Mila stifled her inhibitions, smiled at Walker, and climbed up, a little awkwardly, into the truck. And as he closed the door, and went around to the other side, she reminded herself that she’d have to be careful about how she responded to social cues. Like shaking someone’s hand. Or letting someone open a car door for you. Until she started to feel like a normal person again, she was just going to have to act like one. Or try to, anyway.

  Walker got into the truck then and slammed the driver’s-side door. “I’m sorry you had to wait out here,” he apologized, simultaneously fastening his seat belt and turning on the ignition. “I don’t know why the bus stop can’t just be in town.”

  “The bus driver said the same thing,” Mila murmured, trying hard to appear relaxed. Walker pulled out onto the county road, and she looked out the truck’s window. There wasn’t much to see yet, though. Only pale green fields, giving way to darker green stands of pine trees. As she watched the countryside slide by, she reviewed what she’d learned about Butternut at the public library in Minneapolis a couple of days earlier. According to its website, it was a town of about twelve hundred people situated in the northernmost part of the state, a part of the state that Mila associated almost exclusively with frigid winters. But it had summers, too, apparently, because most of the photographs were of nearby Butternut Lake, looking resplendently blue in the sunshine and featuring people fishing, canoeing, and waterskiing. Still, if the town’s website made Butternut Lake look both accessible and populated, the view of the lake from Google Earth told a different story. It was a big lake—almost twelve miles long and, in places, over a hundred and twenty feet deep—and part of it, one whole end of it, in fact, was managed by the National Forest Service and appeared, to Mila’s eyes anyway, to be virtually unpopulated. Even the more “developed” end of the lake, she decided, with its town beach and its dozens of cabins and lodges, seemed barely to puncture the dense wilderness pressing in all around it.

  But as she was considering this, Walker said abruptly, “What, exactly, did the agency tell you about my brother?”

  “Oh,” she said, turning away from the window and trying to compose her thoughts. “Well, they gave me a copy of his medical file. So I know about his injuries, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Do you know anything else about him?”

  She shrugged her shoulders, not entirely understanding the question. “I know his name and his age.”

  But Walker shook his head. “No, what I mean is . . . has anyone told you that my brother isn’t exactly the easiest person in the world to get along with?”

  Mila paused. Ms. Thompson, the woman who owned the agency, had said something about that, only she’d said it a little less politely than Walker had said it. But Mila ignored that question and said, tactfully, “Well, if he’s not easy to get along with right now, that’s not that surprising, is it? I mean, his injuries would be enough to put anyone in a bad mood.”

  “So the agency told you about the accident?”

  “It was in the file. A car accident, right?”

  “That’s all it said in the file? That he was in a car accident?”

  She nodded. “Why? Is there more?” she asked, glancing sideways at Walker Ford. He didn’t say anything right away, though; he just sighed and ran his fingers through his hair. And Mila realized that when he was concentrating on the road, and not on her, she felt more comfortable. She felt comfortable enough, in fact, to steal another look at him. He was about thirty-five or forty, and he was tall and athletically built with short, dark hair and vivid blue eyes. Right now, he was dressed in clothes that gave him the neat, buttoned-down look of someone who was coming from an office, but the way he drove his pickup truck, and the tan he was already sporting so early in the season told her that whatever he did for a living, he didn’t do it sitting at a desk all day.

  “Yeah, there was more,” he said now. “He was in a car accident. But he wasn’t found right away.”

  Mila frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “He was driving on the Arcola Trail, a pretty remote road that runs along a nature preserve outside Minneapolis, and he lost control of his car. I don’t know what happened. And neither does he. He said he wasn’t drinking, or texting or anything like that, and I believe him. He said he just . . . went off the road. But nobody saw him do it, and his car went into a ravine, so the crash site wasn’t visible from the road. As it was, it was almost three days before some man walking his dog stumbled across him. Then it was several more hours before they could get rescue equipment to the scene and cut him out of his car.”

  “Oh my God,” Mila said softly.

  “You didn’t hear about it at the time? It got a lot of play in the media. At least in the Twin Cities area. It’s pretty rare that someone survives three days alone in a car after a crash like that,” he added.


  Mila shook her head. “No. I must . . . I must have missed it,” she said. The truth, of course, was that her life before now, such as it was, hadn’t lent itself to lingering over a cup of coffee and the newspaper every morning.

  Walker nodded, but kept his eyes on the road. “My wife and I were at my brother’s apartment in Minneapolis when the state police called us and told us he’d been found. We’d driven down from Butternut the day before because we were worried about him. He wasn’t answering his cell phone, or his e-mails, which, if you knew my brother, was cause for concern. He is—he was, I should say—a complete workaholic. Anyway, the authorities caught up with us there, and we met my brother at the trauma center they’d airlifted him to. He was in bad shape, really bad shape,” he said, and when she looked sideways at him again, she saw his face was aggrieved. Reliving this, she saw, was literally painful for him.

  “Anyway,” he continued. “You saw the file. Hypothermia. Dehydration. A concussion. Facial lacerations. A collapsed lung. Broken ribs. A fractured left tibia . . .” His voice trailed off.

  “Those first days, after the accident, must have been very difficult for you and your wife,” Mila said, and for a moment, she forgot her own apprehension.

  “You have no idea,” Walker said. “Reid, of course, was pretty out of it. But my wife and I . . . the first night we spent at the trauma center felt like an eternity for us. And it was touch and go there with Reid for a while. Luckily, though, he was in pretty great shape before the accident, and that’s probably what pulled him through. And when he started to turn around, after the first couple of days, my wife and I wanted to celebrate. But one of the doctors warned us. He said, ‘The hard part’s not over yet. Because now is when it really starts to get difficult.’ And I thought ‘now’? As if what we’d already been through hadn’t been hard enough? But you know what I’ve realized since then? He was right. Because then reality set in. And we realized, all three of us, my wife and I and Reid, that it was just the beginning.”

  “It’s a long road back,” Mila said quietly.

  “Well, if it’s a road, then it’s a highway, and we haven’t even gotten on the entrance ramp yet,” Walker said, a little wearily. And then, looking over at her, he asked, “Can I be honest with you, Ms. Jones?”

  She nodded.

  “It isn’t just Reid’s injuries I’m worried about. The injuries, at least, you can see. And treat. It’s . . . it’s the other things I find more troubling.”

  “You mean, your brother’s been different since the accident?”

  “Very different. I mean, he was never the easiest guy to get along with. He was always . . . intense, I’d guess you’d say. Driven. He could be hard to be around. He didn’t really know how to relax. My wife used to say he didn’t have an off switch. But now . . . now he doesn’t seem interested in anything. Or anyone.”

  “Well, depression is not uncommon after a serious accident. Has he had a psychological evaluation?”

  “No. He’s refused to have one. He doesn’t deny that he’s depressed. But his attitude is ‘why shouldn’t I be depressed?’ It’s depressing, he says, being stuck in a wheelchair, and being dependent on other people for almost all your needs.” Walker sighed. “We’ve urged him to see a psychologist. We’ve even gotten a referral for one. But he won’t go. Even before the accident, he wasn’t a big believer in talk therapy.”

  “All right,” Mila said. “But what about taking medication for depression? I’m sure his doctor would consider prescribing it. Would he consider taking it?”

  “No. We suggested that, too. But he says he takes enough medication as it is. And I can’t argue with him there. He takes a lot of medication. A lot of pain medication. Too much pain medication, probably.”

  “What do you mean by ‘probably’?”

  Even in profile, Walker looked sheepish. “I mean, I’m not sure how many medications he takes, and how much he takes of any of them.”

  “Well, who’s giving him his medication?”

  “He’s giving it to himself.”

  “And you don’t know if he’s taking the correct dosage or not?”

  “No,” Walker said, obviously embarrassed. “But I do know that a couple of the medications he’s taking can be habit forming.”

  Mila sighed inwardly. This was one complication she hadn’t foreseen. But if she was going to do her job right—and she was going to do it right—then she’d obviously have to take charge of the situation.

  “I’ll speak to your brother,” she said calmly. “And I’ll tell him that from now on, I’ll be the one dispensing the medications. He’ll take the correct dosage, at the correct time. No exceptions.”

  Walker looked relieved. “Thank you,” he said. “I appreciate that.” They lapsed into silence then, and Walker drove, staring straight ahead, for several hundred more feet before he suddenly pulled onto the gravel shoulder of the road, put on the brakes, and shifted the truck into neutral.

  “Look,” he said, turning to a startled Mila. “There’s something else I need to talk to you about before we take the turnoff for Butternut. And it’s important that I talk to you about it before you spend your first night at the cabin with my brother.”

  “All right,” Mila said, a little uncertainly. She’d wondered about this, about being alone with a man again, especially in close quarters, as she was with Walker Ford, and she’d wondered if she’d be afraid. But she wasn’t afraid, she realized. She wasn’t for the simple reason that she knew, intuitively, she had nothing to fear from this man. He was tired, and stressed out, but he wasn’t dangerous.

  “Look,” he said now, “my brother, Reid, has these dreams.” Then he corrected himself. “No, not dreams. They’re nightmares. And you’ll know when he’s having them, too. Because you’ll hear him. He . . . he screams, I guess, is the best way of putting it. Though sometimes, honestly, it sounds almost . . . not human. Sometimes he screams things you can actually understand. You know, like ‘help,’ stuff like that. But sometimes, he just screams. And it’s worse, somehow,” he said, with a visible shudder. “It’s worse when you can’t understand him. But if you wake him up, which I’ve done a couple of times, he says he doesn’t remember what he was dreaming about. But I think it’s pretty obvious, don’t you? I mean, what must that have been like for him? Being trapped in his car for three days? Drifting in and out of consciousness? And in horrible pain?”

  Mila didn’t answer. How could she? Nobody but Reid Ford would ever know what that had been like.

  Walker looked at Mila now and then looked out the window and onto the empty road. The rain, which had been a light drizzle, had started to come down a little harder, and Walker turned on the windshield wipers, which squeaked rhythmically, almost comfortingly, against the windshield. He started to say something, then stopped, then started again. “The nights with my brother are going to be tough,” he said. “No doubt about it. But the days, the days might be worse.”

  Mila looked at him questioningly. He blew out a long breath, and she knew whatever he was going to tell her next was something he didn’t really want to tell her. “I know I said before that my brother isn’t the easiest person in the world to get along with, but I think I might have understated the problem. It’s why we’ve had trouble keeping home health care workers. Two of them, in fact, have quit already.”

  “I know that,” Mila said. “The agency told me.”

  “Did they?” Walker said, surprised. “And you still agreed to come all the way up here?”

  “A job is a job,” she said simply. And a job two hundred and forty miles from my old life was just too good a job for me to pass up.

  “Well, some jobs are worse than others,” Walker said, with a wry smile. “But I’m glad you feel that way. And I’m glad we had this talk, too. It was my wife, Allie’s, idea. She suggested we try to prepare you for the worst. You know, ‘forewarned is forearmed’? That kind of thing. It was also her idea to give Reid an ultimatum this time. Sh
e’s telling him—right now, in fact—that if this falls through, we’ll have to send him back to the rehabilitation center he was in after the accident. Obviously, though, we’re hoping things turn out differently this time. Because between my wife and me, we have two children—one who is an infant—and two businesses. And to say that we’re holding our own right now would be to give both of us too much credit. Most of the time, we’re barely keeping it together. And that’s on a good day.”

  As he said this, Mila felt a wave of sympathy for him. She knew what he was talking about. “Barely keeping it together” had become her stock-in-trade recently. But Walker Ford didn’t need to know about that. What he needed to know was that she could help him. Help them. Because if she couldn’t help people, she’d need to find a new career.

  “Look,” she said now. “Don’t worry about your brother. Let me worry about him. I’m good at getting along with people.” Or I used to be, anyway. “I’ll find a way to make this work,” she continued, smiling her encouragement. “And that way, you and your wife can concentrate on the rest of your lives, all right?”

  He looked surprised and relieved. “Thank you” he said simply.

  “Now, is there anything else I need to know?” Mila asked, feeling, for a moment, like the competent person she had once considered herself to be.

  “You mean, is there anything else you need to know about my brother?”

  “Or about the job. About my responsibilities.”

  “Well,” he paused. “We’ve already discussed his medication. You’ll give that to him, right?”

  “Right.”

  “And, let’s see, what else . . . Well, there are a few things my brother can do on his own now. Fortunately, the cabin he’s staying at right now—it’s where my wife and children and I lived before his accident—already had doorways wide enough for a wheelchair. But we’ve also installed an entrance ramp, and a hospital bed, and retrofitted his bathroom, so he can handle his basic needs.”