The Mountain Midwife Read Online Free

colleagues. The twenty-eighth one was from his sister, telling him to call her regardless of when he got into town. Ten more messages from reporters kept his finger busy on the Delete key. Three from his parents and two from his brother sounded anxious. His heart warmed at their loving care of him. Justin had left two messages, and another eight came from college classmates he hadn’t heard from in years. His mouth quirked up in a grim smile at those, at how people who had called him a nerd in school now wanted to lay claim to friendship, but he didn’t delete them. He would give them the courtesy of responding.
    Then, after three more messages from reporters, he received the oddest message of them all.
    The area code of the number the computer voice recited was 540. Who did he know in the 540 area code region? He scrolled through the missed calls on the cordless phone to see what it revealed, while the accent of the caller, a combination of southern drawl and country twang, told him the woman’s origins lay somewhere in the Appalachian Mountains. He didn’t recognize the voice. No doubt she had seen the video of his accidental rescue of a family and wanted . . . something.
    He started to delete the message.
    And then her words began to sink in. Instead of punching the 3 to delete, he pushed the 1 to replay the message.
    “Zachariah, I wondered how you’d sound as a grown man . . .”
    Fatigue, shock, and disbelief that anyone could be so crazy sent a tremor running through him. He needed sleep. He needed food. He needed to delete the message and put it down as someone not in her right mind. Only the travel, the jet lag, and the events preceding his departure from Europe held him captive enough to think the woman was serious even for a moment.
    But she called you Zachariah.
    He doubted even someone in the news world could have dug up his birth certificate or school records in the time since the video emerged and now. He had legally changed the name Zachariah to a mere Z nearly fourteen years earlier. And the rest of the message, off in the middle, added with the abandoned name, belonged to either someone lost in a weird fantasy or else frighteningly sane.
    For all her smoker’s gravelly voice, she sounded too sane to ignore.
    His hand less than steady, he punched the 2 to save the message, then called his parents.
    “Hunter.” Mom answered the phone on the first ring. “We’ve been waiting up for you to call. Are you all right? You weren’t hurt? They didn’t try to arrest you or anything? The media aren’t hounding you? You know you can go to the cabin if—”
    “Let the boy talk.” Dad’s calm voice on another line interrupted Mom’s spate of questions. “Of course they didn’t arrest him. He wouldn’t be home if they had.”
    “I was detained for questioning and then let go.” Hunter spent the requisite fifteen minutes calming Mom’s concerns and answering their questions, giving a quick version of the minor rescue that had turned into the saving of half a dozen lives.
    “It wasn’t terrorists, Mom.” He tried to stop his mom’s rant about how dangerous the world was and how he should stop traveling.
    As if he could and still do his job.
    “It was a local anti–European Union organization, and that family and I were in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
    “More like you were in the right place at the right time,” Dad interjected. “God is good.”
    “He is.” Hunter rubbed the back of his neck. It felt as though someone had replaced his muscles with steel bands.
    Even Mom quieted to think about that.
    Hunter was tempted to say good night and hang up, yet if he didn’t ask, didn’t set the nonsense to rest, he wouldn’t get the sleep he so desperately needed.
    He took a deep breath. “Mom, Dad, I got the weirdest message on my voice mail. Part of a message. The voice mail filled up and cut her off, but I heard enough.” He stopped and laughed. “Never mind. It had to be a crank