Change of Heart (Edilean 9)

She then told the man she couldn’t go because she had a son to take care of and she couldn’t leave him. As though the whole thing were timed, Miranda was called to the phone to be asked—begged, actually—by Eli to be allowed to go with Chelsea’s family on an extremely educational yacht trip. Maybe she should have protested that he’d miss too much school, but she knew that Eli could make up any work within a blink of an eye, and he so wanted to go that she couldn’t say no.

When she put down the phone, the man was still standing there, waiting for her answer about accepting the job.

“Two weeks only,” she said, “then I have to be back.”

Only after she agreed was she told that her new patient was staying in a remote cabin high in the Rockies and the only way to get there was by helicopter or horse—but there was no place for the ’copter to land. Since the idea of being lowered on a rope from a helicopter didn’t appeal to her, she said she’d take the horse.

Early the next morning, she hugged and kissed Eli as though she were going to be away from him for a year or more, then got into a car that drove her thirty miles into the mountains. An old man named Sandy was waiting to take her up to the cabin. He had two saddled horses and three mules loaded with goods.

They rode all day and Miranda knew she’d be sore from the horse, but the air was heavenly, thin and crisp as they went higher and higher. It was early autumn, but she could almost smell the snow that would eventually blanket the mountains.

When they reached the cabin, a beautiful structure of logs and stone, she thought they must be in the most isolated place on earth. There were no wires to the cabin, no roads, no sign that it had touch with the outside world.

“Remote, isn’t it?”

Sandy looked up from the mule he was unloading. “Frank made sure the place has all the comforts of home. Underground electricity and its own sewage system.”

“What’s he like?” she asked. Because of the narrow trail, they hadn’t been able to talk much on the long ride up. All she knew of her patient was that he’d broken his right arm, was in a cast, and that it was difficult for him to perform everyday tasks.

Sandy took a while to answer. “Frank’s not like anybody else. He’s his own man. Set in his ways, sort of.”

“I’m used to old and weird,” she said with a smile. “Does he live here all the time?”

Sandy chuckled. “There’s twelve feet of snow up here in the winter. Frank lives wherever he wants to. He just came here to . . . well, maybe to lick his wounds. Frank doesn’t talk much. Why don’t you go inside and sit down? I’ll get this lot unloaded. If I know Frank, he’s out fishing and won’t be back for hours.”

With a smile of gratitude, Miranda did as he bid. Without so much as a glance at the interior of the cabin, she went inside, sat down, and immediately fell asleep. When she awoke with a start, it was about an hour later, and she saw that Sandy and the animals were gone. Only a huge pile of boxes and sacks on the floor showed that he had been there.

At first she was a bit disconcerted to find herself alone there, but she shrugged and began to look about her.

The cabin looked as though it had been designed by a computer, or at least a human who had no feelings. It was perfectly functional, an open-plan L-shape, one end with a huge stone fireplace, a couch, and two chairs. It could have been charming, but the three perfectly matched pieces were covered with heavy, serviceable, dark gray fabric that looked as though it had been chosen solely for durability. There were no rugs on the floor, no pictures on the walls, and only one table had a plain gray ceramic lamp on it. The kitchen was in the corner of the L, and it had also been designed for service: cabinets built for use alone, not decorative in any way. At the end of the kitchen were two beds, precisely covered in hard-wearing brown canvas. Through a door was a bathroom with a shower, white ceramic toilet, and washbasin. Everything was utterly basic. All clean and tidy. And with no sign of human habitation.

Miranda panicked for a moment when she thought that perhaps her patient had packed up and left, that maybe she was here alone, with no way down the mountain except for a two-day walk. But then she noticed a set of doors beside one of the beds, one on each side, perfectly symmetrical. Behind one, arranged in military precision, were some pieces of men’s clothing: heavy canvas trousers, boots without a bit of mud on them.

“My, my, we are neat, aren’t we?” she murmured, smiling, then frowned at the twin bed so near his. No more than three feet separated the beds. She did hope this old man wasn’t the type to make childish passes at her. She’d had enough of those in school. “Just give me a little kiss, honey,” toothless men had said to her as their aged hands reached for her body.

Laughing at the silliness of her fantasy, Miranda went to the kitchen and looked inside. Six pots and pans. Perfectly arranged, spotlessly clean. The drawers contained a matched set of stainless steel cooking utensils that looked as though they’d never been used. “Not much of a cook, are you, Mr. Taggert?” she murmured as she kept exploring. Other cabinets and drawers were filled with full jars of spices and herbs, their seals unbroken.

“What in the world does this man eat?” she wondered aloud. When she came to the last cabinet, she found the answer. Hidden inside was a microwave, and behind the tall door in the corner was a freezer. It had about a dozen TV dinners in it, and after a moment’s consternation, Miranda laughed. It looked as though she’d been hired to cook for the missing Mr. Taggert as much as anything else.

“Poor man. He must be starving,” she said, and she cheered up at the thought. The beds so close together had worried her, but the empty freezer was reassuring. “So, Miranda, my girl, you weren’t brought here for a sex orgy but to cook for some lonely old man with a broken arm. Poor dear, I wonder where he is now.”

She didn’t waste time speculating but set to work hauling in supplies. She had no idea what Sandy had brought on those two mules but she soon found out. Packed in dry ice, in insulated containers, was nearly a whole side of prime beef and a couple dozen chickens. There were bags of flour, packets of yeast, some canned goods, and bags of fresh fruit and vegetables. With every item she unpacked, she felt more sure of what her true purpose here was, and thinking of someone who needed her made her begin to forget how easily Eli had said he didn’t need her for the next two weeks. He’d told her in detail how very much he wanted to travel with Chelsea and her parents to the south of France, then on to Greece aboard some Italian prince’s yacht.

“All in just two weeks?”

“It’s a really fast boat,” Eli said, then disappeared into his room.

With a sigh, Miranda put a frozen chicken in the microwave to thaw. She would not let herself think how Eli needed her less every day. “My baby is growing up,” she said to herself as she removed the chicken and began to prepare a stuffing of bread cubes, sage, and onion.

“Don’t start feeling sorry for yourself,” she said. “You’re not dead yet. You could meet a man, fall madly in love, and have three more kids.” Even as she said it, she laughed. She wasn’t a heroine in a romance novel. She wasn’t drop-dead gorgeous with a figure that made men’s hands itch with lust. She was a perfectly ordinary woman. She was pretty in a dimpled sort of way—an old-fashioned prettiness, not the gaunt-cheeked style that was all the rage now. And she was—well, face it, about thirty pounds overweight. Sometimes s

he consoled herself that if she’d lived in the seventeenth or eighteenth century, men would have used her as a model for a painting of Venus, the goddess of love. But that didn’t help today when the most popular models weighed little more than ninety pounds.

As Miranda settled down to prepare a meal for her absent patient, she tried to forget the loneliness of her life, to forget that her precious son would soon be leaving her to go to school and she would be left with no one.

Two hours later she had a lovely fire going in the big stone fireplace, a stuffed chicken roasting in the never-before-used oven, and some vegetables simmering. She’d filled a bowl full of wildflowers from the side of the cabin and put a dry pinecone on a windowsill. Her unpacked duffel bags were by the bed the man didn’t appear to use. She’d draped her sweater across the back of a chair and put an interesting rock on one end of the stone mantel. The place was beginning to look like home.

When the cabin door was flung open and a man burst in, Miranda almost dropped the teakettle. He was not old. There was some gray at the temples of his thick black hair and lines running down the sides of his tight-lipped mouth, but his virility was intact. He was a very good-looking man.