Saving Katy Gray (When Paths Meet Book 3)

  Saving Katy Gray

  When Paths Meet, Book 3

  By Sheila Claydon

  ISBN: 978-1-77145-269-4

  Published By:

  Books We Love Ltd.

  Chestermere, Alberta

  Canada

  Copyright 2014 by Sheila Claydon

  Cover art by Michelle Lee Copyright 2014

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book

  * * *

  Dedication:

  To Geoff, who helped me to clear my mind

  Chapter One

  Emlyn scowled as his cell phone began to vibrate.

  “You could turn it off. The world won’t stop if you take a fifteen-minute lunch break,” Jack told him.

  Ignoring the advice, he swallowed a mouthful of sandwich and answered the call. The voice at the other end was accusatory.

  “You’ve forgotten haven’t you? So now she’s sitting staring at the chipped paintwork and wondering what kind of an idiot provides a stack of Rugby magazines for his clients to leaf through while they’re waiting.”

  With a muttered oath he stood up, crashing his chair to the floor as he did so. “I’m on my way,” he promised.

  “You better had be because she’s already refused tea and coffee so your window of opportunity is closing fast.”

  Stuffing the cell phone into his pocket, he righted the chair and picked up his battered briefcase. His friend grinned at him. “What have you forgotten this time?”

  “An interview with another nurse/companion. Dorothy has finally found someone prepared to live in Corley and here I am, about to blow it.”

  “Nonsense! One look at your rumpled appearance and she’ll decide it’s not just your mother who needs looking after. Before you know it she’ll have taken you in hand as well.”

  Emlyn glared at him. “Not even remotely funny Jack. I need a professional not someone who wants to get personal. I don’t have time for emotional outbursts either. The last one spent more time lying in wait for me so she could complain about my mother than she did caring for her.”

  Visualizing Emlyn’s mother, Jack felt a twinge of sympathy for the unnamed companion. Thanks to her slowly encroaching dementia, Mrs. Brooks was changing from an agreeable eccentric into someone much more challenging and, in the process, making her son’s life close to impossible. He wondered how long it would be before his friend finally accepted defeat and moved her into a nursing home. Dropping his bantering tone, he nodded towards the door.

  “You’d better get going then, before this one escapes and you’ve got to ask Mrs. Tomlins to help out again.”

  Glancing at the clock behind the bar Emlyn produced another colorful oath, took a large swig of beer from the almost full tankard in front of him, slapped Jack on the shoulder by way of an apology, and ducking to avoid the ancient beams on the ceiling, made for the door. With a wry smile Jack poured the abandoned drink into his own glass and reached for his friend’s second, untouched, cheese sandwich.

  * * *

  Katy Gray smiled at the woman standing in the doorway. “It’s not a problem, truly. I’ve no other plans today. All I’m going to do, once I’ve met Mr. Brooks, is explore the village.”

  Dorothy French gave a hollow laugh. “Which will take about ten minutes and by the time you reach the end of the High Street you’ll have decided it’s the last place on earth that you want to live. There’s not a clothes shop in sight. No supermarket either. Just gift shops, the pub, the hotel and the church.”

  The sound of a door slamming interrupted her. With an apologetic nod she bustled into the outer office leaving Katy to contemplate the drab waiting room of Brooks, Brooks & Leighton Solicitors. Wondering how many clients its air of dusty neglect had driven away, she gave a bitter smile. Corley might not suit Mr. Brooks’ secretary but as far as Katy was concerned it was exactly the sort of place she had spent weeks looking for.

  * * *

  “Mr. Brooks is ready to see you now,” Dorothy almost pushed Katy into the room and then blocked the doorway behind her as if she was afraid she would turn tail and run once she saw the state of his office. Katy, however, was more interested in the man standing beside the window than the papers that covered the desk and were stacked in untidy piles around the edge of the room. He wasn’t at all what she had expected. Somehow, during her conversation with his secretary, she’d conjured up a picture of an overweight middle-aged man who was a bit of a dinosaur. The Mr. Brooks of her imagination was older and fatter and shorter. A lot, lot shorter.

  “I’m so sorry I’ve kept you waiting. My meeting went on for longer than I expected,” he explained as he held out his hand.

  Shaking it, Katy kept her face expressionless. He obviously wasn’t aware that every word spoken in the outer office could be heard in the waiting room thanks to a badly fitting door. She remembered, word for word, his reaction to his secretary’s suggestion that he should conduct the interview somewhere other than his own office.

  “I’m not going to pretend,” he’d said. “I know my office is a disaster…everyone who comes in here knows it…so I’m not going to protect Miss Gray from the truth. She’s going to be faced with far worse at my mother’s house, so if she decides to take the job I don’t want her walking out on the second day because she can’t stand the mess.”

  “You’ve already decided to offer it to her then?”

  “Of course I have. I’m so desperate that unless she’s suffering from some sort of contagious disease, or has two heads, it’s hers. As you’ve already told me more times that I can count, beggars can’t be choosers.”

  “Nor can they afford to be grumpy. Be nice to her Emlyn. She’s already been waiting for almost an hour and, unlike all the previous girls you’ve employed, she does at least have some relevant nursing experience.”

  “In that case I might overlook the two heads,” he’d told her, and Katy, despite herself, had smiled.

  Now though, she kept her face very straight as she accepted his apology. Two could play at that game. She wasn’t going to tell him the whole truth either.

  * * *

  Dorothy closed the door behind her with slightly more force than necessary, leaving Emlyn to move papers and files from one of the two chairs in front of the desk. Looking for somewhere to put them he decided that the windowsill was his best option. As they slowly collapsed into the pile of folders already there, Katy sat down. With an apologetic shrug, he took his place behind the desk. “I’m afraid filing is low on my list of priorities.”

  Trying very hard not to look as if she agreed, Katy smiled politely and then offered him the folder containing her references. He waved it away.

  “I believe Mrs. French has already seen them.”

  “Yes, and she asked a lot of questions when I telephoned. She asked a lot more today, too, while we were waiting for you,” Katy said, trying very hard not to think of the less than truthful information she had given the older woman.

  He nodded. “I know, and as she’s already told me to offer you the job, it’s yours if you want it.”

  She stared at him. “Don’t you want to look at my references, or ask me why I want the job or how much notice I have to give…you know, the usual things?”

  “This is not a relationship Miss Gray. It’s a job. If Mrs. French thinks you’re suitable then I’m sure you are.”

 
; “Well if I’d realized you were only going to be interested in whether I had two heads or not, I wouldn’t have bothered to wait,” Katy’s temper, unreliable at the best of times, got the better of her before she could stop it. To her surprise, he laughed.

  “So you heard our conversation did you?”

  “Yes, and the bit about being desperate.”

  “And yet you stayed. Why was that?”

  She shook her head, unable to tell him that she was desperate too. “Maybe I didn’t want a wasted journey.”

  “Well now you know the worst, do you want the job?”

  Their eyes locked as they summed one another up; hers hidden behind ugly spectacles, his hazel with yellow glints, like a big cat. That’s what he reminds me of, she thought. A lion: all tawny mane and aloof arrogance but battered too, as if he’s been in a fight.

  “Well?” He was waiting.

  She nodded. “But only if your mother approves.”

  He smiled and this time his eyes were friendlier. “In that case let’s go and find out if she does.”

  Chapter Two

  The house, which was called Oak Lodge, was large and old and built of honey- colored brick, and the front door was wide open. With an exclamation of concern Emlyn pushed past Katy and hurried inside. In less than a minute he returned, his face creased with worry.

  “She’s not here,” he said.

  “Perhaps she’s in the garden,” Katy started walking around the side of the house as she spoke, noting as she did so that part of the concrete path was pocked and broken.

  Striding past her, Emlyn hurried into the back garden. Katy, following, heard him call out in alarm. When she found him he was kneeling beside an elderly woman whose head was lying in a pool of blood. For a moment she was frozen with horror but then her training took over, and in a moment she was beside him and assessing the injury.

  “It’s not as bad as it looks,” she told him, as she helped the woman to sit up. “Although she’ll need a lot of stitches, there’s no irreparable damage. Head wounds always look worse than they really are because the scalp bleeds a lot.”

  He shook his head. “For one terrible moment I thought she was dead.”

  Seeing the shock on his face, Katy decided he’d cope better if she gave him something to do. “Do you know where she keeps her towels? I need something to staunch the wound until we get her to hospital.”

  He stood up with a suddenness that startled her. “Upstairs I think but you’ll have to get them yourself because I need to find my mother before she causes any more damage.”

  He gave a weary smile when he saw the startled expression on Katy’s face. “This is her friend, Mary Tomlins. She’s been looking after her for me ever since the last girl left.”

  Katy pulled a pack of tissues from her bag and, ripping off the cellophane wrapping, pressed them to the gash on Mrs. Tomlins’ head. “Can you hold these in place while I go and find some towels,” she asked her.

  With a low moan the elderly woman did as she was told. Satisfied that for the time being at least, she wasn’t showing signs of concussion or worse, Katy stood up and confronted Emlyn.

  “Go and find your mother while I deal with Mrs. Tomlins. You can worry about what actually happened between them later on.”

  He opened his mouth to say something, changed his mind, and hurried off down the path after giving the injured woman a final worried look. When he eventually returned Katy and Mrs. Tomlins had both disappeared.

  * * *

  He was still trying to persuade his mother to eat her supper when Katy rang the doorbell. Recognizing her silhouette through the glass panel in the front door he was surprised by a feeling of relief. At least she’d come back. Whether she’d want the job now she’d seen what his mother could do was an entirely different matter.

  She spoke as soon as he opened the door. “Mrs. Tomlins is fine. She needed quite a lot of stitches but there’s no lasting damage. She doesn’t even seem to be concussed, although the doctor wouldn’t agree to discharge her until I’d arranged for someone to stay with her overnight. She asked me to phone somebody called Jack,” she added when she saw the question in his eyes.

  Although he didn’t answer her, he opened the door wide and stepped aside. With a slight smile she accepted his silent invitation and followed him across a hallway whose elegant proportions were eclipsed by too much furniture and too many coats hanging from an assortment of hooks. Beneath them a scatter of boots and shoes were waiting to trip the unwary. The sitting room was equally messy. Every surface was cluttered with books and papers or strewn with clothes.

  Ignoring the mess, Katy confronted Emlyn as he started to clear a space so she could sit down. “It was an accident you know. Your mother didn’t hurt Mrs. Tomlins. She tripped on the path where some of the concrete has crumbled away.”

  He stopped what he was doing and straightened up. “Are you sure?”

  “Positive. She made me promise to come back and tell you. She said you’d worry otherwise. I assume you found her, your mother I mean?”

  He nodded, wondering why he was disappointed that Katy Gray had only returned because she had a message for him, not because she still wanted the job. “I spend so much time worrying about what my mother is going to do next that when I saw Mrs. Tomlins in a pool of blood I’m afraid I thought the worst. She can behave very badly when she’s frustrated,” he explained.

  “Which is entirely normal in her condition,” Katy’s voice was matter-of-fact. “People who are developing dementia spend so much of their time feeling confused and frightened that it sometimes makes them angry. Where did you find her?”

  “In the greenhouse. I’d have looked there first if I’d been thinking straight. It’s where she always goes when she’s upset…”

  A loud crash interrupted him. With a sharp intake of breath he opened a door into what Katy supposed was meant to be a dining room. Instead it resembled a second hand furniture store where stacked chairs, dusty tables and several oversized dressers all competed for space. In the middle of it stood an elderly woman. She was dressed in an odd assortment of clothes and her hair was tied up with a bright red scarf. On a table in front of her was an upended drawer and she was rummaging through its contents. When she saw Emlyn she started to cry.

  “I can’t find it,” she sobbed. “It should be here because it’s where he always keeps it, but now it’s gone and he’ll be angry.”

  With a sigh Emlyn attempted to distract her. “Don’t worry about it now. You can look for it later when you’ve finished your tea. Come on, come back into the kitchen with me.”

  Angrily she shook off his arm and carried on with the futile search for something that only existed in her memory, her face puckered in distress. Then she saw Katy and stopped.

  “Who is this?”

  Without waiting for Emlyn to introduce her, Katy stepped forward. “I’m Katy,” she said. “And Emlyn has invited me for tea.”

  * * *

  Later, sitting at the kitchen table while his mother poured tea into mismatched china cups and dispensed slices of stale coffee cake with the largesse of a born hostess, Emlyn wondered if he was the one going mad. Katy smiled at his confused expression.

  “It’s all about familiarity,” she explained in a low voice while Mrs. Brooks was refilling the kettle. “When Mrs. Tomlins fell and hurt herself your mother became so frightened that she lost all sense of time and place. Even though she knew she should help she couldn’t remember what to do. That’s why she ran away.”

  He shook his head. “I’ll never understand it.”

  “Never understand what dear?” His mother rejoined them at the table and bit into a large slice of cake. Then, without waiting for an answer, she turned to Katy.

  “Who is this?”

  “I’m Katy,” for a second time Katy interrupted Emlyn’s attempt to introduce her. “Emlyn has invited me to stay here for a few days if that’s alright with you.”

  Mrs. Brooks gave her
a beaming smile. “How lovely. A visitor. What did you say your name is my dear?”

  Chapter Three

  “You’re looking remarkably chipper,” Jack said as Emlyn pushed a tankard of beer along the bar towards him.

  “I am. I can’t believe the difference Miss Gray has made to my mother’s life. In little more than a month she’s cajoled her into something that vaguely resembles a routine. Now she not only goes to bed at a reasonable hour, she also eats regular meals.”

  “Well hooray for Miss Gray. Tommy told us how efficiently she mopped her up after she fell and hit her head.”

  Emlyn looked embarrassed. “I forgot to thank you for collecting her from the hospital that night didn’t I? Thank god for you and Izzie, and thank god for Mary Tomlins too. Anyone else would have sued me over the broken path.”

  “Well she’s not going to so you can stop talking like a lawyer and tell me more about the wonderful Miss Gray. Why does she want to live in Corley and look after your mother if she’s as competent as you say she is? Shouldn’t she be managing a hospital ward or something?”

  “Beats me,” Emlyn shrugged as he lifted his glass. “I’m not about to ask her either because I don’t want to rock the boat.”

  “It must be the countryside then. What does she do on her days off? Does she go striding off into the hills with a rucksack and a map or is she a birdwatcher. Please tell me she wears camouflage and sets off laden with cameras and tripods?”

  Although he grinned at Jack’s description, Emlyn squirmed with embarrassment for the second time. “I…she doesn’t seem to want much time off. She says that living in my mother’s house is like working from home. She’s implied that it’s a bit of a luxury, a perk of the job, and has told me that if she ever needs some free time she’ll let me know.”