Free Eyes at the Window by Deb Donahue Page B

in the orchard all day. There’s no telling what he might have found out there. He’s like a garbage pail sometimes, the things he thinks are food.”
    “The Terminator here is like that, too.” Sissy stood up and went over to the hound who had followed them inside. She reached down to pat the Basset’s smooth head. “I think I still have some of the medicine the doc gave me the last time. Let’s see if that does any good before we start worrying.”
    The veterinary clinic, Sissy told Miranda, only had set office hours and had already shut down for the day. “The doc is getting up in years, so I guess he’s entitled to be set in his ways, but Lord, if someone’s got a calf that needs tending to off hours, you’d think we were asking him to cough up a kidney.”
    She wrapped up a small white pill in a piece of cheese and fed it to Rufus. He sniffed it first, then gulped it down. Licking Sissy’s hand once again, he laid his head on Miranda’s knee, awake but not alert.
    “Let’s give that some time to work,” Sissy said, pulling up a chair from the kitchen table to sit next to Miranda. “If he’s not feeling better in a little bit, I’ll drive you to the doc’s house myself and we’ll bang on his door till he finally comes out, office hours or no office hours.” She pulled out knitting needles and a skein of red yarn from a sewing basket on the floor and started working on something that looked like a sweater.
    “He looks like he might fall asleep,” Miranda said, noticing Rufus’s eyelids seemed to be getting heavy.
    “Yeah, those pills make them a bit sleepy. Sleep is the best medicine there is. Cures a body while the mind takes a rest. Not that I recommend using drugs to get to sleep. Natural’s always the best way to go.”
    Miranda agreed. “Although,” she added, “sometimes that’s the only thing that works. I’m certainly glad I took some last night. You’d think I would have slept like a log after all the work I did around the place, but I had the worst dreams that kept me tossing and turning all night.”
    She was also beginning to wonder if maybe she’d need to resort to sleeping pills again tonight. She was feeling wired again, her heart pumping, ears ringing. Rufus seemed to sense her tension, whimpering in his sleep and jerking with little yips like he was having nightmares.
    When Sissy offered her some chamomile tea, Miranda accepted readily, hoping that would calm her down. They chatted about their dogs while Sissy shuffled around the kitchen getting cups and tea leaves, setting the kettle on the stove. The Terminator had earned his name from the number of chickens he’d killed in his youth. “Harlan wanted to put him down but he was only acting according to his nature. A hunting dog’s got to hunt and if you don’t let him take after raccoons or pheasants, well, you’re bound to have to lose a chicken or two.”
    Miranda requested recommendations for someone who could help her move or haul away some of her grandmother’s things. Sissy told Miranda where she could get the freshest produce and what time the Fall Festival started on Saturday. Harlan and Bob, she said, were off in the fields harvesting corn.
    “They’re liable to be gone till after dark during the week like this. I tell you, that man owns so many acres it’s lucky he can take the Lord’s day off during spring and fall. And Bob half the time don’t even do that. You’d think the man was paid by the hour, the amount of time he spends on that combine.”
    Finally the medication seemed to have settled Rufus into a natural sleep and the tea had at least kept Miranda’s skin from crawling. Miranda decided he seemed well enough to return home.
    “Here,” Sissy said, pressing a bottle of pills into her hand when they reached the front door. “A dog his size, give him half a pill in the morning and another tomorrow evening. If he’s not better by then, you can find the clinic out by the interstate, next to