Caroline thought the conversation was over, until Sam added, almost under his breath, ‘Although we’d prefer to be thanking him in person.’
‘My father loves the island. All M’Langi. I can hear it in his voice when he talks about it, asks questions. But my mother’s death, and Christopher … It seems he blamed himself, and now he says both the hospital and Christopher need him more on the mainland. Over there he can keep a watch on Christopher’s care and also make money and lobby for money to keep this place going.’
Sam sighed and departed, but the conversation had brought Caroline’s mind back to the problems at the mine. Of course mortgaging half a house had been a stupid idea, but Keanu hadn’t come up with anything better.
Keanu …
The kiss …
Setting the past and the future firmly out of her mind, she went into the big ward, where she discovered that the boys with the coral cuts had been released. The woman with unstable diabetes was sleeping once again, as was their patient with the Biruli ulcer. The woman with the baby had also gone, so all she had to do was hang around in case she was needed.
And use the time to try to sort out the mess inside her head.
Start with the mine—there had to be some way …
But how could she think when she was hungry? She headed for the kitchen, where she found several salads made up in the main refrigerator.
‘Staff salads,’ the note attached to the shelf said, so she took one, went back into the desk in the ward to keep an eye on her patients and ate it there.
Thinking, almost subconsciously, of the grandparents she’d barely known.
How terrible for them to have lost their daughter—their only child—so far away from home. Max had flown his wife’s body back to Sydney to be buried there, and had taken first his babies, and later his toddlers—well, Christopher had never actually toddled—to visit their grandparents.
But both of them had been dead before Caroline was six so it was difficult for her to summon up more than an image of a defeated-looking old man and woman.
Defeated by grief, she’d realised, much later.
‘Are you okay? You must be tired. I can take over here if you like.’
Keanu’s arrival interrupted her unhappy thoughts.
‘No way. I have a feeling if I handed over, or even had you standing by, it would reinforce everyone’s opinion of the worthlessness of all Lockharts.’
Keanu smiled, something she wished he wouldn’t do, at least when she was around.
‘Hettie will be over soon and she’ll stay until Mina comes on, but I can at least hang around and keep you company. I’m being Maddie this week and she was on call so I might as well be here.’
He pulled a chair over from beside the wall and sat beside her at the small desk, far too close.
Caroline managed to manoeuvre her chair a little farther away from him but he was still too close. She could feel the force-field of him, as if the very air around him had taken on his essence. It was because of the kiss—she knew that. It had done something to her nerves and spun threads of confusion through her head.
‘I talked to your father,’ he said, startling her out of thoughts of kisses and physical closeness. ‘He can’t get over at the moment but has asked me to make sure the mine is closed, at least temporarily until he gets a chance to look at things and maybe get it going again.’
‘You talked to Dad?’
‘I thought it might be easier, the mine closure, coming from me and not a Lockhart. I know how distressed you are about the damage Ian’s done to the family name.’
Caroline turned so she could study him.
‘And you think you telling them will make a difference? It’s still the Lockhart mine, and with everyone connected to it now losing their incomes, of course the blame will come back on the Lockharts.’
She was so upset she had to stand up—to move—pacing up and down the silent ward while her mind churned.
It was the right thing to do—she knew that. It was far too dangerous for the miners to keep working without the tunnel being shored up.
‘I’ll do it,’ she said, suddenly weary of the whole mess, and when Keanu started to argue she even found a tired smile.
‘Best all the blame lands on us,’ she told him. ‘We don’t want everyone hating you as well.’
Keanu shot up from his chair and took her hands.
‘No one will ever blame you, Caroline,’ he said, and the feel of her hands in his—the security of her slim fingers being held by his strong ones—fired all her senses once again.
She eased away from him.
‘I have patients to check, and it’s probably best if you go, because it’s too easy to be distracted when you’re around.’
‘Really?’
He smiled as if she’d given him a very special gift, then leaned forward to peck her cheek before leaving the room.
Keanu went back to his quarters but was too restless to settle down. His phone call to Max, the closing of the mine and his still-vague idea of how to save it, his increasing attraction to Caroline—all were drawing him further and further into the web that was the Lockharts.
He couldn’t help but think of his mother, so humiliated by Ian.
Probably already ill, she’d never really overcome their banishment from the island. It was as if Ian’s words had left an enduring scar in her mind, and poison in her body. In his mother’s mind, the happy Lockhart days had gone, and the stories of the Lockharts taking her in after her own family had disowned her and her husband had died had been long forgotten.
Almost without orders from his brain, his feet took him back out of the villa that was currently his home and up the hill to the grassy slope behind the big house to where his father was buried among dead Lockharts and other islanders who’d lived and worked on Wildfire.
To the grassy slope where Alkiri would be laid to rest tomorrow …
Keanu sat down by his father’s grave, idly pulling a few weeds that had recently appeared, trying desperately, as he often did, to remember his father.
But memories of a two-year-old were dim and not particularly reliable so all he had were the stories his mother had told over the years.
His father, bright star of the school on Atangi, had been sent to the mainland for his high-school education, all the costs met by the Lockhart family. From boarding school he’d gone on to university, studying science, and returning, with the woman he’d met and fallen in love with, to Wildfire to work at the research station and begin the first investigation into the properties of M’Langi tea.
His mother’s tales had told of their early adventures, the two of them roaming the mountains on the uninhabited islands, in search of the special tree from whose bark and leaves the tea was made.
He’d been two years old when his father, working with a local friend, had been killed by a rockfall on an outer island.
Two years old when his mother and he had moved into the comfortable, self-contained annexe off the big Lockhart house. It was only after Caroline and Christopher were born, and their mother died, that old Mrs Lockhart had offered his mother a job—helping with the baby and generally running the house.
‘I thought I might find you here.’
Caroline’s voice startled him out of his reverie.