Moonlight in the Morning

Moonlight in the Morning

Chapter 1
One
Edilean, Virginia
2011
Jecca Layton was coming to Edilean for the entire summer!
Dr. Tristan Aldredge put down the phone with his cousin Kim. At last something good was happening in his life! In the last weeks he’d begun to think that he was on a downward spiral that was never going to end.
His arm itched, and he did his best to use the coat hanger wire to scratch it under the cast. So much for medical school, he thought. All those years of training and what did he use for the incessant itching but a coat hanger?
As always, he tried not to think of what had happened to him a few weeks before. He’d been on his way to the airport when he realized he’d left his cell phone at home. Since he was the only doctor in a small town, he couldn’t risk being out of touch. He drove back home and came upon a robbery in progress. Before he knew what was happening, he’d been hit in the back of the head with a golf club and kicked down a hillside. So now his arm was in a cast, his father had come out of retirement to take over Tris’s practice, and Tristan had been told to “rest.” To do nothing. Let his arm heal.
This pronouncement had made him waver between suicide and murder. How was he supposed to do nothing? He couldn’t help but think how many times he’d told his patients just what his doctor had said to him. Over the years, Tris had put on his most sober face and told patient after patient to find something he/she could do with one arm or leg. To Tris, it had seemed like a temporary thing, so why so much complaining? But when he was told the same thing, he’d said that was impossible.
“I have patients. An entire town depends on me,” he’d said to his doctor.
“And you’re the only one who can handle it?” the man replied with one eyebrow raised. He had no understanding of Tris’s predicament and certainly no sympathy. Tris thought about running his chair over the man’s stethoscope—while it was in his ears.
His father had been worse. He’d come up from Sarasota where he’d been living in retirement and started complaining the second he entered Tris’s office—the office that used to belong to him. His father saw everything that Tris had changed and told his son that it should have been left the way it was. When Tris protested, his father told him to go home and rest.
“Doing what?!” Tris had muttered as he left.
He’d thought about getting out of Edilean for a while, but that hadn’t appealed to him. He liked being home, and besides, he had plants to take care of. And patients to see on the side, ones that his father wouldn’t know about.
Still, the prospect of the summer was bleak, and he dreaded it.
But then, Kim called to ask how he was doing. He’d refrained from telling her the truth, but he did manage to give a few sighs and she rewarded him with some sympathy. She’d then told him the wonderful news that her friend Jecca Layton was coming to Edilean to spend the entire summer painting.
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