Home by Morning (13 page)

“Oh, really? What about the blood oozing from her eyes? Have you got a cure for that in one of your great-grandmother’s damned books?”

Mae gaped at her, the tirade interrupted. Apparently, Jessica had finally made an impression on her. “She’s b-bleeding from her
eyes
?”

Desperate and out of patience, Jess went on, full of righteous anger. “If you won’t help with nursing, would you at least cook for the sick? They need soup and bland food. Even
I
need to eat.”

The sharp angles and planes of the old woman’s face softened a bit. “Well, I can see you look a little peaked yourself.” Lowering her jaw, she said, “All right, I’ll come. And I’ll cook too. I’ve got some beef bones simmering in the stockpot downstairs right now.”

Jess closed her eyes for a moment and drew a long breath. “Thank you,” she answered hoarsely.

“Let’s get this materiel unloaded,” Adam Jacobsen ordered from behind a white gauze mask. “Careful with the medical instruments.”

Materiel
, Cole groaned inwardly. Oh, brother.

Under a sky heavy with dark clouds, Cole once again found himself helping to move some of Jessica’s equipment, this time to the high school, three blocks from her office. Jacobsen had appointed himself foreman of this operation, and Cole sizzled under the man’s arrogance. He stood at the school’s front door, full of importance, with his clipboard, on which he occasionally scribbled a note, tucked under his arm. Several wagons and a car or two were parked in front of the school, loaded with supplies.

It wasn’t that Cole minded helping out. In fact, he was amazed at how quickly Jessica had managed to galvanize the town, getting donations of bedding, cots, and other necessities. And there were plenty of volunteers helping with this trail drive. Even Susannah and crusty Mae Rumsteadt had pitched in, although Amy was at home nursing a headache.

What Cole minded was Jacobsen himself. When a man marched down the street in Powell Springs with a bouquet and a box of chocolates, he might as well be waving a red flag and firing a shotgun. People went to their windows to watch. Word got around.

And the word going around was that despite the turmoil of sickness and deaths, Adam Jacobsen had found time to begin courting Jessica. More than one person, including Pop, had taken the trouble to mention it to Cole. He knew he shouldn’t care, that it was none of his business. But the notion grated on him like a file on a blister, just as Jacobsen always had. Although the epidemic was shaking the town to its very foundations, or maybe because of it, people were eager to talk about Powell Springs’s latest romance. It had raised a few eyebrows, but for the most part, people seemed to approve of the pairing.

“Cole,
please
—wear the mask I gave you,” Jessica called from the doorway before she ducked back inside.

“Yes, Braddock, put on your mask,” Jacobsen added. Cole sent him a venomous glare. The man broke eye contact first and pretended to shuffle his papers, which pleased Cole enormously. He knew it was childish. Just the same, he wished he could have five minutes alone with God’s self-important goody-goody.

White gauze masks had arrived the day before and were being distributed around Powell Springs. Just about everyone here was wearing something over their noses and mouths—masks or handkerchiefs—but Cole wasn’t sure they’d really do any good. To keep the peace, he reached into his shirt pocket, took out the mask, and tied it on. Then from the back of his truck, he hoisted a box of sheets to his shoulder and climbed the front steps of the school.

He walked through the hallway that led to the gymnasium, a trip he’d already made several times. The big room, which had barely been used since last June, smelled of the fresh floor wax it had received over the summer. It was a hive of activity now, with people setting up cots, making beds, and unpacking supplies. Jessica was overseeing the tasks in here.

“Where do you want these sheets?” he asked. She stood on the gleaming wood near a teacher’s desk that had been brought in for her use. The exercise equipment that usually stood in this space had been pushed to one wall.

“Give them to the ladies down there,” she replied, indicating a few women on the far end of the gym. “They’re organizing the bedding.” Looking at him over the top of the mask, she continued, “I really appreciate you being here, Cole. You’ve been very…helpful during this whole business.”

He shifted the box and backed her into a quiet corner. “I hear Jacobsen has been helpful, too. Everyone seems to know how helpful he’s been.”

Her gaze darted away from his—it was odd trying to talk to her when all he could see were her eyes. “Yes, Adam arranged to get this space for me. His position on the town council is very fortunate.”

“I’m not talking about the town council, and you know it.” He dropped his voice to a low, angry tone. “What are you doing with him? We didn’t like him when we were in school. No one did, and he’s not especially high on anyone’s list now. But you’re letting him bring you candy and flowers?” He took her elbow and the heat of her skin radiated through her sleeve.

“I didn’t
let
him do anything, and I haven’t encouraged his attention. It was just an innocent gift.” She pulled her arm from his grasp.

“Bullshit, Jess. There’s no such thing as an innocent gift when it comes to him. He’s still a snoopy tattletale, and now he’s one for the government too.”

She pulled down her mask, revealing lips that were full and softly coral, and her eyes narrowed. “Honestly, Cole! Are you suggesting that he seduced me with chocolate to worm some kind of information out of me? To make me inform on my patients?”

He felt his face grow warm. “Hell, no, I didn’t mean—”

Her brows snapped together. “Do you realize how ridiculous and truly insulting that sounds? That he isn’t even sincere about his courtesy to me? And that I would so easily submit to such maneuvers?”

“That’s not what I meant!” Sweat and stale air built up behind the piece of gauze he wore on his own face, and he yanked it off. Without it, he could smell the spicy fragrance of her hair and skin, despite the antiseptic odors. It was so familiar. He’d dreamed of it often—and recently.

“No? Then what are you talking about?”

A knot of frustration and raging jealousy burned like acid in his gut. “People are saying that he’s courting you.” It galled him to even utter the words.

She put her hand to her throat in mock horror and gazed at him with wide eyes. “Why, my stars and garters, the shame of it all! A respectable woman being courted by a minister. Whatever is the world coming to?”

“Is it true?”

“Why is this your business?” she demanded, dropping her hand.

He frowned. “I just don’t understand why you’d want to have anything to do with that pissant.”

She pressed her lips into a prim, tight line before answering. “My personal life is none of your concern. Not anymore, and you know why. Good God, you sound more like Shaw every day.”

Taken aback by the comparison to Pop, he was about to blunder on when Susannah’s approach interrupted the scene. She and Jessica exchanged looks. Susannah’s long, dark curls were pulled into a thick tail. She wore a split riding skirt and boots, and Cole knew she’d spent the dawn hours working with the horses.

“Cole, did you bring the bed linens? We’re putting all that down here.” Susannah pointed to a group of assorted china cabinets they were using for storage. Each bore a sign that read “Courtesy of Hustad’s Fine Furnishings.”

Swearing under his breath, he turned abruptly and walked away, wondering why life had become so damned complicated.

By that afternoon, patients had begun occupying the cots in the gymnasium. The volunteers hung sheets to create separate men’s and women’s sections, and there were patients on both sides. Granny Mae brought over a kettle of beef broth from the café, as she had promised, and it sat on a wood stove in a nearby classroom, ready to feed the hungry.

But most of Jess’s patients were too ill to eat. The sickest of Powell Springs’s citizens straggled into her makeshift infirmary, delivered from the backs of wagons and cars. A couple even wobbled in on foot. And they all came with an astounding variety of symptoms. Some she would expect with influenza. Others, such as hemorrhaging from the nose, mouth and eyes, petechial hemorrhages—bruise-like marks under the skin—ruptured ear drums, and of course, the frightful omen of cyanosis, ranging from gray-blue to indigo, were particularly horrific and baffling. The sounds of coughing, groaning, retching, and incoherent rambling echoed off the ceiling and walls of the big, open room. Every news dispatch she’d managed to get reported that this was influenza, and that it was mowing down people all over the world, but she swore that some of the symptoms resembled those of typhoid and cholera. She had never seen anything like this.

As for the rest of the globe, well, Jessica’s own world had shrunk to this one, the town of Powell Springs.

Now, as night fell, she sat for a moment at the teacher’s desk in the corner and massaged her temples, contemplating the miserable panorama of cots and sickness.

Granny Mae, dutifully wearing her mask, perched on a stool beside shivering six-year-old Philip Warneke and sponged his brow.

“Mama,” the boy cried weakly, his dark hair damp and his eyes fever-glazed. “Want Mama.”

“Hush, now, young man. Your mama is resting, and that’s what you need to do,” Granny said.

Jess supposed that what Mae told the child wasn’t a complete lie. Anna Warneke was “resting” in the cloakroom, wrapped in a sheet and tagged, waiting with two other victims to be taken to Fred Hustad’s undertaking business. She had died shortly after being moved to the school. Philip was an orphan now. His father had been killed in France last June.

Touched by the child’s pitiful circumstances, Granny had taken charge of him. An asafetida bag hung from her neck, containing the most foul-smelling of mysterious concoctions and long believed by many to ward off disease. Afraid to ask what was in it, Jessica was grateful for her own mask, which helped block the fumes. If she weren’t so desperate for Granny’s help, she would have made her remove the vile thing and bury it behind the school. But she knew that would spark an argument and the woman’s possible decampment, which Jess could not afford.

For the time being, an uneasy truce existed between her and the tough old lady, and she was glad for that. How long it would last, though, was something she had no time to think about. The rest of her masked volunteers, frightened but biddable, followed her directions without much question. One and all, the patients’ chests had been slathered with Vicks VapoRub, had a piece of flannel stuck to the salve—to help it penetrate to the lungs, Granny said—and been dosed with the morphine pills made up by the druggist.

What could Jess do for these people with such puny weapons? She felt as if she were fighting a swarm of locusts with a flyswatter. Nothing in her training or experience had prepared her for this. But then, what modern physician had had to deal with a plague in recent times?

Given everything she’d read, and what she’d seen here with her own eyes, she was ready to concede that this influenza was more than an epidemic.

It was indeed a plague.

It was nearly eight o’clock by the time Jess walked back to her office. Although Powell Springs was a quiet place at night, now it almost seemed abandoned, as though everyone had left suddenly to escape an oncoming and unseen invader. She tightened her coat collar around her throat, trying to hurry her tired steps as a chill wind moaned through the trees and swirled dead leaves around her. Streetlights were few and added little illumination to dispel the feeling of gloomy emptiness that hung over the town.

At last Cole’s smithy came into view, and her own office beside it. She flogged her draining energy, as if pushing a spent horse toward a finish line, and reached her door. Out of breath and her heart thumping, she rooted around in her pocket to find the key.

No sooner had she gotten inside, locked the door again, and begun climbing the stairs, than she heard someone knocking.

“Oh, please no,” she muttered. For a moment, she was tempted to skulk here in the shadows, then tiptoe all the way upstairs where she wouldn’t be seen.

The knocking continued.

With a weary sigh, she turned and went back down the steps. In the darkness she could see only the shape of a tallish man through the door’s glass pane. “Who is it?” she asked.

“Jessica, it’s Adam. I’ve brought you some dinner.”

She twisted the switch that turned on the light and opened the door. Adam stood there, bearing a wicker hamper. Beyond his shoulder, she could see his horse and buggy tied to a hitching ring at the curb down the street.

“How thoughtful of you!” A snippet of her earlier conversation with Cole ran through her mind, but she pushed it away. She was hungry and tired, and Adam had brought her something to eat. Cole had not. “Please—come in. I just got here myself, and I dreaded the idea of having to cook. I’m not very good at it on the best of days.”