Outback Arrival : A contemporary medical set in an outback Australian hospital. A city nurse follows the doctor she loves to the bush town where he manages his family’s cattle properties, determined to prove her love for him. But can he accept that she is carrying his baby and that those he trusts have lied?
‘No, no, no! Bodies don’t stand up and walk out of hospitals.’
‘I’m real sorry, Nurse Kristie.’ The weather beaten grounds-man shuffled his feet in front of her office desk, distress adding a decade to his sixty something years.‘Looked everˈwhere. Can’t find it.’
‘This can’t be happening, Joey. A corpse cannot just disappear. Somebody must have noticed something.’
‘Sure ain’t sometin´ no normal person’d tuck un’erneath their arm. Walk out with, when visitors go ‘ome.’
Kristie adopted the calm and confident demeanor that had helped her tackle hundreds of emergency room dramas without showing a moment of panic. Casualty nurses joked that no matter how many crazy things you’d dealt with, something stranger was always about to walk in your door. Or in today’s case, walk out of the morgue’s door.
She hauled in a deep breath, while mentally chastising herself for not making more time to attend yoga classes, for Joey’s sake if not her own. She faked a confident smile. ‘We have to find his body, Joey. Quickly. Before the board’s fusspots hear what’s happened. Or we’ll have them arriving, en masse, and breathing down our necks.’
When she’d arrived four weeks earlier, the majority of the board members had welcomed her with open arms. Enticing an experienced nurse away from a city hospital to a remote outback town didn’t happen every day and the town had seen them as heroes saving their stretched outback health system. The few remaining few board members, however, were old-fashioned, staid, and highly suspicious of her motives.
Kristie had learned to be vigilant at work and circumspect when off duty. During her three months’ probation as Director of Nursing, she couldn’t afford any slip ups or she wouldn’t be contracted for a permanent position, no matter how desperate rural towns were to keep medical staff.. Those board members, the ones lacking a sense of humor, would be horrified that a recently deceased member of their small community had mysteriously disappeared from the hospital’s morgue. Although morgue was a loose term for a brick shed which housed a refrigerator, a work bench, and was supposedly cooled by a temperamental air-conditioner. Misplacing a body, without any of her rostered staff noticing, would be classified by the board as her first mistake, a huge mistake.
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