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Hunsacker?”
    It was like hitting a switch. One minute his eyes were as animated as Billie’s, the next he was smiling as if Casey were his best friend. “Sure. You know the routine, I’m sure.” Picking up one of the script pads, he quickly scribbled. “What do you like on your pizzas?”
    Still trying to catch up, Casey blinked. “Huh?”
    Hunsacker ripped the prescription off the pad and handed it over, smiling and relaxed. “Mushrooms? Anchovies? I owe you a pizza for putting up with Mrs. VanCleve for me.”
    “Mushrooms,” she answered instinctively, wondering at the odd, niggling little feeling in her chest.
    “Casey, do you have any empty rooms?” Barbara asked in that tone of voice that relayed to everyone that Casey was goldbricking.
    “I’m dismissing twenty right now,” Casey assured her, the frustration bubbling close again.
    “Thanks, bon,” Hunsacker said, his attention on his notebook. He seemed to be carefully scratching out notations and adding more. A list maker. “Next time I’m here I’ll ask for you especially. You’ve been a doll.”
    Shutting the little book, he returned his attention, to Casey. Flipped on the voltage and laid a hand on her arm whether she wanted it there or not. And Casey, knowing that at least four women in the room envied her, didn’t like it.
     
    It wasn’t until the end of the shift, when the bunch of them were scattered over the nurses’ lounge like shaken rag dolls, that Janice even had the chance to bring up the subject of the wonder doctor.
    “So, Casey,” she said, head back against the chair, eyes closed. “Have you asked Hunsacker to bear your children yet?”
    From where she sat sprawled on the threadbare old couch in the corner, Casey couldn’t even manage a shrug. She was measuring her visual acuity by trying to read the notices on the bulletin board across the room, or as they’d dubbed it, the BOHICA board, for Bend Over, Here It Comes Again. Three new forms were displayed that needed to be filled out for every surgery patient. A sign said no change-of-shift parties were allowed in the lounge. The refrigerator was for patient food, and the microwave for the doctors.
    “He sure did seem to like you,” one of the other nurses admitted, pulling off her shoes to massage her toes. “Damn it.”
    “I’m not sure I like him,” Casey answered quietly, trying to analyze the discomfort she felt about Hunsacker’s friendliness.
    For a moment she didn’t notice the stunned silence around her. She was still thinking of that pelvic, those clenched fingers. That smile. All that familiarity.
    Another notice said that Libby Kelly had been replaced as head nurse on telemetry. Word was that she’d bucked one of the doctors up there and lost.
    “Are you crazy?” Barb demanded. “How many other doctors would have taken Mrs. VanCleve off your hands?”
    “How many doctors would have smelled that nice doing it?” Janice countered, taking a last, long drag from her end-of-shift cigarette and grinding it out in an ashtray on the table they’d stolen from the fourth-floor waiting room. “Why in heaven’s name don’t you like him?”
    When Casey looked over to answer, it was to discover the degrees of outrage that met her words. There wasn’t a sympathetic face in the room.
    “I don’t know,” she had to admit anyway. “I just don’t know.”
    Nobody agreed with her. Nobody really understood. And Casey couldn’t think how to make them. She just had a hunch and a set of nervous neck hairs, and nobody in their right mind would count those as irrefutable evidence of anything. All the same, Casey couldn’t shake the suspicion that Dr. Dale Hunsacker wasn’t the person everybody thought he was.

Chapter 2
    CASEY DIDN’T DWELL on Dr. Hunsacker. In fact, once she got past the mushroom pizza he sent the next day, she barely thought of him in the weeks that followed. He showed up in the emergency room on occasion, but never found reason to work with