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do?”
    “Please—come and join me for a short meeting,” Cookson asked again and held out his hand in a gesture of invitation.
    Jessica glanced around, baffled and looking for an escape. There was none. “Well, all right.” She followed him, dodging a woman pulling along two children who clutched small American flags in their fists. There was a bright, holiday atmosphere on the street.
    When they arrived at city hall, Cookson whisked past his secretary. “No interruptions, Birdeen,” he said to the dark-haired woman sitting at a switchboard outside his door. Birdeen Lyons held dual jobs as the mayor’s receptionist and Powell Springs’s telephone operator, although as far as Jess knew, telephones here were not as common as they were in other places. Powell Springs was still a small town, and only a house or two per block had one.
    “Sure, Horace.”
    Breezing into his untidy office, he pushed a pile of papers off the chair next to his oak desk. He motioned to Jessica to sit. “I don’t have any tea or coffee here, but I could send out to the café. It would only take a minute.”
    “Thank you, no.” She glanced around. On the wall behind the mayor’s desk, she saw the same war bond poster that was in nearly every shop window in town. Next to it hung a small, framed photograph of Eddie, looking stiff and proud in his army uniform.
    The mayor sat down in his chair and turned to face her. “You’ll have to forgive me for herding you off the sidewalk. Believe me, I wouldn’t have done it if this wasn’t urgent.”
    Jessica nodded and waited for an explanation that was more urgent than giving his sick boy a simple ride to the family farm. His round face, though kind enough, gave away nothing.
    “This morning when I heard you’d arrived in town and then tended to my son, I called a special meeting of the town council.”
    She straightened in the chair, on her guard. How had word of her arrival gotten around so quickly? Then her brows met over the bridge of her nose as a thought occurred to her. “For heaven’s sake, did Granny Mae actually complain to you about it? Is that why I’m here?”
    “Now, now, don’t let Mae ruffle your feathers. She’s a fine woman and a fixture in this community. She’s been here since Methuselah wore knee pants, mixing potions and delivering babies.”
    Now now, there there …This was so typical of the kind of patronizing attitudes she’d endured since deciding to pursue medicine. “Mayor Cookson, my feathers are not—”
    “Mae is a fine woman,” he interrupted, “and she makes a chicken stew that would put my mother’s to shame, rest her soul. But I think we can agree that she is not a medical doctor.”
    Jess’s mouth, which she’d opened to continue her defense, snapped shut. Then she went on cautiously, “Well, no, she isn’t. That was why I stepped in.”
    “And I’m glad you did. We need a physician, and we’ve been without one since Doc Vandermeer was taken by the influenza last spring.”
    “I understood that you’ve found one.” Amy’s last letter to her had mentioned that.
    “Yes, Frederick Pearson. A presentable young graduate, as far as I can tell from his letters.” He shuffled through another few stacks of papers on his desk. “Well, I don’t see them right now. But presentable or not, I’m still not certain when he’ll be here. We’ve been expecting him for a while. With the war on, most of the doctors and nurses have gone overseas.”
    She already knew that. In fact, she wasn’t sure how presentable this Pearson could be since the army had drafted every physician who was even semi-competent. The only ones left were quacks without degrees and a few females like herself, in whom the army was not interested. “How does this involve me, Mr. Cookson?”
    He folded his big farmer’s hands on his desk blotter. “It was a short meeting. After some argu—I mean jawing, the council voted that I should ask you stay on in Powell Springs