Amore and More: Love Everafter

By L.L. Raand

Midnight Hunters

The Midnight Hunt

Blood Hunt

Night Hunt

The Lone Hunt

The Magic Hunt

Acknowledgments

Not far from here is the Mary McClellan Hospital, a rural community hospital that sits high on a hill above the small town of Cambridge, New York. The hospital was financed entirely by a single individual, as was not unusual several centuries ago, and opened in 1919. It closed in 2003 and stands empty now, a silent testament to a bygone era. I found some pictures on the Internet that show the interior as it is now, with much of the equipment still in the rooms—old hospital beds, bent IV stands, monitors with blank faces. The halls seem eerily empty, beyond deserted, abandoned and forgotten.

For eight years of my life I was a surgery resident, and for most of that time, I spent every third night on call in the hospital. I walked the dark halls, listened to the murmurs of patients and staff, and wondered what the world was like beyond the glass where I could see the shimmering lights of the city. I can remember sitting with my fellow residents in the surgical lounge as morning approached, having spent a sleepless night taking care of in-house patients, responding to emergency calls, and finishing up the work of the day that never seemed to end, silently congratulating one another at having survived another day. Much has changed in medicine in the last decades, much for the better, but I think losing our community hospitals is not one of the benefits of progress. Now we must drive far from home to places with which we are not familiar, to be taken care of by strangers, often in surroundings where we become lost among the many.

This book did not start out as a commemorative to those lost hospitals, or lost moments in time, but as I wrote it, I felt the loss and wondered if we have not done a disservice by depersonalizing what must, after all, be one of the most human and humane experiences. This is not a book about hospitals or medicine, but a love story like all my novels are, which takes place in a singular community with the hospital near its heart. In the end, the heart of a romance novel always resides within the characters. I hope you enjoy these.

Thanks go to senior editor Sandy Lowe, who daily makes my job easier and gives me more time to write; to editor Ruth Sternglantz for understanding my work and where I’m going, sometimes before I do; to Stacia Seaman for careful reading and essential corrections; and to my first readers Connie, Eva, and Paula for constant encouragement.

Sheri found just the images I wanted for this book, and came up with a memorable cover—like always.

And thanks to Lee, who wanted to sneak up to the hospital at night with a flashlight for a glimpse of the past. Amo te.

For Lee, for always saying “why not?”

Chapter One

Harper Rivers ran along the shoulder of the narrow, twisting country road, the rising sun at her back and the broad Hudson lazily flowing to her left across a half mile of freshly plowed floodplain. The brisk early summer breeze cooled the sweat on the back of her neck, and the aroma of tilled earth burgeoning with life teased her senses. Her skin tingled with the pulse of blood through her veins, and the crisp air filling her lungs chased away the lingering exhaustion from a sleepless night. The rhythmic thump-thump-thump of her Sauconys on the cracked blacktop kept pace with her pounding heart, and her mind slowly emptied of everything except the inevitable joy that came with the resurgence of spring. She slowed as a pickup overtook her from behind and waved as the driver blew his horn before she turned down a crushed-gravel drive, wide enough for two good-sized tractors to pass, bordered on either side by apple and pear trees, their leaves a vibrant green and the first blush of blossoms glistening on the tangled boughs. A half mile ahead, a stately white country house reminiscent of a Southern plantation home with a pillared two-story front porch sat on a hill above the river. Smoke curled from one of the four stone chimneys, carrying the sweet, yeasty scent of baking bread from the kitchen hearth. She angled away from the flagstone walk leading to the formal front entrance, followed the winding rough stone path around the side of the portico to the rear of the house, and bounded up the broad wooden steps to the wide-planked rear porch. Just as she reached the screen door, a voice from inside greeted her.

“Don’t come in here with those muddy shoes, Harper Lee Rivers.”

“Yes, Mama,” Harper said as she always did in response to the familiar order. She toed off her running shoes, left them by the door, and walked in her socks into her mother’s domain. The kitchen, the informal meeting room for the entire family and most visitors, stretched almost the entire length of the rear of the home, dominated by a fifteen-foot-long timber table that had been carved from the hickory trees that once dominated the hilly profiles of upland New York farms. The rough-hewn wood had been worn down by decades of pots and dishes sliding across its surface and the vigorous polishing of generations of Rivers wives and children. The appliances had been updated, but everything else about the kitchen was as it had once been when the home was built 250 years before. The counters were of the same dark red-brown hickory as the table, the long thin grain interrupted here and there by darker knots and whorls. Hand-cut beams bearing the square scars of the axman’s blade supported the white board ceiling, and gray-green flagstone formed the entrance floor adjacent to the oak floorboards. An open hearth, four feet square and just as deep, held an early morning fire to chase away the chill.

Her mother pulled a pan of biscuits from the double-stacked oven and slid it with practiced efficiency onto a stone trivet on the wood counter. Harper made a fast grab for one and just as quickly snatched her hand back when her mother swatted at her with a wooden spoon.

“You know they’re best when they’ve cooled a little. Sit and drink your coffee.”

Harper pulled out a straight-backed wood chair with a leather seat shaped to comfort by decades of occupants, plopped down at the table in her usual place, and stretched her legs toward the hearth.

“You’re up early,” her mother said, sliding a mug of coffee in front of her. She regarded Harper with the direct gaze guaranteed to make Harper squirm when she was keeping something secret, although she hadn’t had secrets in a long time. At least none that her mother needed to know about. She tried hard not to fidget and searched her memory for a forgotten birthday or a missed family gathering. Ida Rivers was big on meeting family obligations.

“Or,” her mother went on, “have you not been to bed at all?”

Relaxing now that she realized she hadn’t committed a family sin, Harper sipped the strong black coffee and gave a sigh of contentment. The run and the familiar scents and sights of her mother’s kitchen drained away the lingering twists of tension from the last few hours. “Mary Campbell decided to deliver a little early. Her labor took most of the night.”

“First times can be like that. Everybody doing all right?” Her mother sounded interested despite having undoubtedly heard the same story in countless ways from Harper’s father over the last thirty years. Maybe truly caring helped make up for all the times Harper’s father hadn’t been around when her mother would have liked him to be.

“Everybody’s fine, including Tim. I thought for a while I’d have to get him a bed next to Mary’s.”

Ida laughed. “First-time fathers. Worse than the mothers by a long shot.”

“You got that right.” Harper grinned, leaned over, and snagged a biscuit without getting swatted this time. “I saw that Dad’s SUV is gone. I thought he wasn’t going to take night calls anymore.”

Ida huffed. “Yes, and we won’t be planting the lower forty again either.”

Harper nodded as she buttered the flakey biscuit. Neither was likely to happen in her lifetime. Her father was an old-time country physician, just like she was, and if the call came, it went against the grain to tell the patient to go to the emergency room. Not when all it meant was getting out of bed, pulling on a pair of jeans and a flannel shirt, kicking into boots, and driving through the quiet country night with the company of the deer and possum and raccoons who appeared in the headlights, stared for a moment as if questioning why you were intruding on their domain, and bounded off into the underbrush with a dismissive swish of a tail. Those moments were among the most peaceful she’d ever known. Why would she pass those up while denying her patients the care of a doctor who knew them, and whom they trusted, at the same time?

“I told him I’d take his calls. I know all his patients.”

“You ought to—you’ve been going out with him since you were ten.”

“So you work on him—he’s earned a full night’s sleep.”

Ida speared her with a glance. “You think you’ll be ready to turn your patients over to someone else in another twenty-five years?”

“Okay, maybe not.” Harper didn’t think of medicine as a job, but as a responsibility, one she’d wanted since the first time she’d rode beside her father in the front seat of a Ford pickup with his big battered black bag between them, making house calls. She loved being greeted at the door by a friend or neighbor who opened their home to her and put their life in her hands because they trusted her. What she did mattered, and in her heart of hearts, she didn’t think anyone else could do it as well. Except her father. “Maybe I can get him to cross-cover with me now and then. At least he’ll get a few nights off that way.”