Home by Morning (15 page)

When she turned the knob and pulled open the door, though, her eyes flew wide. The man on her porch had a face she would never forget. And one she’d never expected, or wanted, to see again.

“Hi, there, little lady. I hear you entertain gentlemen.” Lambert Bauer stood there on her stoop, grinning at her with an idiotic leer that she supposed he thought was irresistibly virile.

“Gentleman! You—
you
a gentleman, Lambert?”

He peered at her, slack-jawed with surprise and looking worse for wear. His clothes were muddy and he had a few days’ worth of patchy beard growing on his narrow, angular face. Time had been no friend to his features.

After gawping for a moment, he found his voice. “Emmaline? Well, by God, Tilly didn’t tell me he was sending me to my own wife for a roll in the hay! What do you think you’re doing, a married woman turned whore? I’ve been looking up hill and down dale for you.”

“Why?”

The question seemed to amaze him. “
Why
! Because. You’re my woman. That’s reason enough.” He might as well have said that she was his saw or his pocketknife—just another possession. He gripped her forearm with a dirty hand.

“You mean you’re down on your luck and broke again.”

“No, that’s not what I mean.” His whiny, mimicking words dripped with sarcasm, but she could still read him. “Who are you to talk, anyway?” He gestured at her and her little shack. “What the hell do you think you’re up to, turning into a trollop?”

“An abandoned woman has to earn a living. No one died and left me a gold mine or a big inheritance.”

He didn’t look the least bit ashamed or seem to realize he had a thing to do with her present circumstances. “Well, I’m sure not going to pay you for my husband’s rights.” He began to push his way inside. “I’m getting what I came for, so you just go on in there and—”

In an instant, she recovered from her paralysis and pulled her arm away. Memories flooded back, of beatings and cheatings, of arguments and belittling, threats and intimidation. In a surge of anger, fear, and astonishment, she grabbed the loaded shotgun she kept beside the door. She was a fair shot, too. Living in this remote place, if a customer turned mean or a coyote got into her tiny henhouse, no one was going to come to her rescue.

She aimed the double barrels at him. “You get off my porch and keep on going, Lambert. I ain’t your wife anymore. You slapped me around for years and then left me in Parkridge. Our marriage ended that day. I’m long done with you.”

“Is that so?” He straightened, full of righteous indignation. Far too much for a man on the business end of a gun. “Well, I’ve got news for you, missy. You can’t just decide—”

She raised the weapon to her shoulder and pointed it at his weaselly mug. “You git, and don’t come back here again.”

Popeyed, he finally backed down the two rickety steps that led to her door and stood in the yard. His mean face was flushed with rage, but he kept his gaze on the barrels of the shotgun. “I know my rights. I didn’t get no dee-vorce papers and you’re still my wife. I’ll bet that thing ain’t even loaded.”

With hands that were much steadier than her insides, Emmaline aimed at a pinecone hanging from a ponderosa branch above his head and squeezed the trigger. The blast flushed out dozens of birds, and sulfurous blue smoke filled the air. A shower of pulverized seeds rained down on him, making him jump as if he’d been hit by lightning.

“
Goddamn
it!” He danced around like a man who’d stepped in a hornet’s nest. “Are you crazy?”

“Want me to blow off your hat next?”

“You’ve gotten pretty sassy in the last few years. Well, this isn’t over, Emmaline!” He thumped his chest with his forefinger. “I’ll be back, and I’ll bring the county sheriff with me.”

“Whitney Gannon? He visited me just last month. Give him my regards.” She blasted a branch off the same tree, which missed him by an eyelash when it crashed to the ground. Lambert swore a blue streak, and she got a lot of satisfaction watching his skinny shanks trot him down the drive that led to the road.

“This ain’t over!” he shouted again from the edge of the property. He launched this last threat from behind the safety of the overgrown blackberries and weeds before he took off down the road.

Em slammed the door, threw the slide bolt, and sank into the closest kitchen chair. Her heart galloped in her chest so fast and hard, she felt it was all her ribs could do to contain it. Her hands turned cold and shaky. Tremors spread through her limbs, and she shivered on the hard chair. A faint wave of nausea rolled through her. Oh, God…dear God…

She reached for her pack of Lucky Strikes on the table—one of the few luxuries she permitted herself—and lit a cigarette with a hand that held a shaking match. Drawing deep on the tobacco, she sought to calm her frazzled nerves.

Lambert Bauer.

How—why—after all this time, why would he turn up around here?
Why
wasn’t it over? What could he want with her now? And damn that Virgil Tilly for sending him to her place. Of course, he hadn’t known the connection between her and Lambert.

What about the kids? Lambert hadn’t even mentioned them. Did he know about the boys? She raked a trembling hand through her hair. No, he couldn’t. No one knew about them. Only she and one other person knew where they were. Not that Lambert had ever been a father to them. What kind of man could leave a wife with two little boys and still call himself a father?

It was the hardest thing she’d ever done, letting them go, but it was a decision she’d made with love. Most of what she earned went into a bank account in Twelve Mile to pay for their keep. Sometimes she let herself dream of a day in the future when the three of them would be together again. But Em was nothing if not practical. It wasn’t likely to happen, and pretending that it might only made her heart ache.

She stared at the sagging iron bed on the other side of the room. She’d made that bed many times.

And she’d learned to lie in it.

Over the next few days, Jessica tried every remedy she could think of to treat her patients. In desperation she employed plasters, elixirs, tonics, extracts, and distillations of various sorts. She also dispensed aspirin, over Granny Mae’s objections that it was poisonous. Though everyone received the same diligent treatment and conscientious nursing, some lived, but many died. For all her training and experience, Jessica had no idea why. She’d never seen anything quite like it, but she took to heart each life lost or saved.

Those who clung to life, she silently cheered on, seeing each as a victory over death. Those who did not survive gave her a gloomy sense of defeat. Death vanquished her frequently.

Adam spent much of his time at the infirmary, visiting each sickbed, offering comfort and prayers to the afflicted. She heard him recite the twenty-third psalm so many times, it seemed to have worn a groove in her tired brain. More often than not, though, when she looked up, she caught him watching her expectantly, as if waiting for her to accept his proposal, right then and there. In the midst of this pandemonium, he arrived each day with some small gift for her, a handkerchief, a volume of poetry, a lace doily that had been his mother’s. None was too personal, yet given the circumstances, she found his attention annoying and inappropriate.

Added to all this was the memory of her recent horrible conversation with Amy. Jess tried to console herself with the reasoning that her sister’s words had been flung in haste, and that she was overwrought. But even that wasn’t much comfort.

Late one afternoon, she decided she had to get away for a few minutes, away from the rows of cots with their tossing, delirious occupants. She’d had about five hours of sleep in the past three days, and those hours hadn’t been contiguous. “I’ll be outside, Mae,” she said quietly.

The old woman nodded as she sponged Helen Cookson’s brow with a damp cloth. Horace had delivered her in his wagon when she collapsed at home. Mae stepped in to care for her. Jess didn’t mind. She had enough patients of her own. In any event, some of Mae’s hostility had withered after she’d seen for herself the influenza’s devastation of bodies—the ruptured eardrums, the broken ribs, the hemorrhaging, the indigo pallor.

Still wearing her stained apron, Jess stepped out the back door of the school and massaged the tight muscles in the back of her neck. She pulled down her mask and took a breath of clean, crisp air, trying to clear the sickroom stench from her nose and lungs. The rain had stopped earlier in the day, and now the sky was sharp, crystalline blue, the color that only autumn could produce. Boiling kettles of laundry stood in the grassy area to her left, filled with soiled bedding and gowns. To her right, a galvanized stock tank burned the contents of chamber pots that had been carried outside and set afire with kerosene.

But the universe continued about its business, the sun rose and crossed the sky, and the earth settled down for the peace of winter, completely untouched by the doings of the humans who lived and died upon it.

The moon did not care that men were making war on each other in the trenches in France.

The stars that would appear in a few hours had no concern for those whose lives were being snuffed out like candle flames by an organism no microscope could see.

As she stood there, she wished she’d gone to the front door instead. From this spot she could see the old graveyard that had been here before the school was built. The two were separated only by a baseball field and the low, wrought-iron fence that enclosed the place where so many were now being laid to rest. Every family member she’d ever lost slept beneath its turf—her grandparents, her mother, her father, who’d been her rock and her inspiration. She’d never realized that Amy had so resented it…

As if pulled by an unseen hand, Jess left the back porch and strode across the grassy field toward the cemetery. In a distant, less populated area of the acreage, she recognized Winks Lamont and that dreadful Bauer man, both plying shovels to move mounds of dirt beside a large willow tree. Only their upper torsos were visible as they worked in the graves they dug. Nearby sat three coffins, waiting.

Traditional funerals, with mourners and dignified, elaborate ceremonies, had by necessity turned into assembly line affairs. Those families who wished for a few words to be spoken over their departed loved ones often could not attend because they were sick themselves. The dead had to be buried as soon as possible because it would be so easy for them to stack up, as they had in other cities. So they were put in the ground, their location noted, and plans for more formal rites were put off till some time in the future.

Jess averted her gaze and made her way down the rows to a granite headstone that was newer than many of those here. Just two years old.

Benjamin Andrew Layton, MD

Born July 3, 1860

Died January
15, 1916

Beside his grave was her mother’s. She missed her mother, with her wry humor and loving common sense, but losing her father had affected Jessica most. Fallen leaves fluttered over the graves, driven by a brisk wind, and she wished more than ever that she could talk with him. What would he do, faced with this catastrophe? Was there a treatment, a remedy that she’d overlooked? With her crushing responsibilities and no one to turn to, she had never felt more alone in her life.

Her legs shaking with fatigue, Jessica dropped to her knees beside her father’s grave. “Daddy,” she murmured, reaching out to touch his headstone as if it were a shoulder. “Daddy, I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to help these people. They’re dying horrible deaths, no matter what I try.” She talked to him for several moments, telling him of her trials with the epidemic. Then, more haltingly, she whispered the private things in her heart. She rested her forehead on the hand that gripped the stone, and as she spoke in a hushed, almost prayerlike tone, tears spilled down her face.

“I hate Cole for giving up on me. But, God help me, I still have feelings for him.” There. Amy had not been wrong about that. Jess had admitted it, if only to the silence of a grave. But just as it would not repeat her secrets, neither did it give her the counsel she so desperately sought.

“Jessica!”

Hastily, she wiped her tears with the back of her sleeve and looked up. Cole, of all people, trotted toward her with quick, long-legged strides. She frowned. Didn’t he realize he was intruding on her privacy? Despite his other failings, it wasn’t like him to be so dense. As he drew closer, though, she saw that his face was the color of cold ashes.

He stopped on the opposite side of her father’s headstone. “It’s Amy. I drove her here in the truck. She’s got it, Jess, she’s got influenza.”

Cole paced the front end of the gymnasium while Jessica and a couple of other clucking, fussing volunteer nurses put Amy to bed in a recently-vacated cot. Though the walls and high ceiling echoed with the harsh, wheezy coughing of those patients who languished behind the curtained-off area, to Cole’s ears Amy’s hack seemed louder and worse than the rest.

He hadn’t been here since the morning he’d helped Jessica move in. Now fully occupied with the sick and dying, the place had the quality of a waking nightmare. God, just the smells of sickness, disinfectant, camphor, and eucalyptus were enough to drive a person out into the street. He’d tied his bandana over his face, more to filter out the odors than to protect his own health. And with the coughing he heard the same awful sound he’d heard the morning that Eddie Cookson died, a peculiar crackling noise some of the patients made as they moved. Before she’d gotten sick herself, Amy had told him the cause was air trapped in the patients’ tissues.

“‘…restoreth my soul…’”

Adam Jacobsen’s voice drifted to him like a distant sound picked up on a windy day.

“‘…the shadow of death…’”

Cole winced at the words.

“‘…thou has laid me in the lowest pit…thou hast afflicted me…’”

Damn, why didn’t Jacobsen just invite Death to drop by and pick up another goner? Cole wondered, disgusted by the man’s choice of prayers. He rubbed the muscles in the back of his tight neck. If a person wasn’t dead yet, listening to Jacobsen might just send one over the edge.

Cole chafed at his feeling of helplessness. It wasn’t in him to just sit by in the face of trouble. He’d always taken action, determined to do
something
, even if it turned out to be the wrong move. From his limited vantage point, he watched for Jessica to emerge from Amy’s cubicle, guilt and regret nibbling at the edges of his determination to keep his head.

Amy would get well. She had to. If she didn’t—

No, she would. Then…what?

Jessica stared at Amy’s nearly lifeless form, which looked as bruised and disfigured as a flower that had been crushed under a wagon wheel. Right now, at this terrible, frozen moment, all of her training and expertise drained away, leaving her as stunned and horror-stricken as every other person who had watched a loved one hover near death.

And worse, all that training seemed worthless, because she didn’t know what to do to save her sister. The genteel girl of her childhood, one so different from herself, now lay here, ravaged by a disease over which Jess had no power. She folded her hands into a single tight fist and put them to her mouth. “Oh, my God…why? Why Amy?”

“You’ll do everything you can, Jess. Just like you’ve done for everyone here.”

Her eyes hot and her throat aching with unshed tears, Jessica had forgotten that Cole was standing on the other side of the cot until he spoke. He’d pulled the bandana off his face, and his voice was low and rough with emotion.

She looked up at him and thought she saw her own guilt and wretchedness reflected in his eyes. Her first instinct was to reach for him in this time of unspeakable calamity. “I should have forced her to come here as soon as I suspected she was ill. But I let my pride and hurt feelings get in the way of my better judgment. We quarreled about—” She stopped then, remembering who she was talking to, and her anger shifted.

“About what?”

“About you,” she blurted.

“Me!”

“She said you changed your mind about your feelings for her, and that it was my fault. Mine! We both know it’s because you can’t really give your heart to
anyone
!” She wanted to lash out at someone over the unfairness of everything—the all-too-human blunders and bad choices, the twists of fate and timing that had put the three of them, inextricably bound, in this situation. It was so much easier to hurl blame than to accept the unthinkable.

It worked. What color remained in Cole’s drawn face drained away, emphasizing the faint stubble of his russet beard. He looked as if she’d reached across the bed and slapped him. But Jessica didn’t feel better for her outburst. Rather, it sapped what little strength she still had. Just as he opened his mouth to respond, her brief anger fizzled, and she sank to her knees beside Amy and took her hot hand. A garbled sob tried to work its way up Jessica’s throat, but caught there, unuttered.

“
Dr. Layton
.” Adam Jacobsen appeared from behind the partition of sheets. “Everyone can hear you,” he said in a disapproving whisper, “and I’m sure you don’t want to create a scene.” He glowered at Cole, but Cole didn’t flinch.

She felt Adam’s grip on her shoulders, pulling her to her feet. “There’s nothing more you can do for Amy right now. You should go home.”

He tried to turn her away from the bed, but Jess, fixed on a single thought, held fast. “Are you out of your mind? I can’t leave her and the rest of these people!” Everything—the room, the scene, even the colors of things—had an unreal, dreamlike quality.

“You can’t do anything else for them right now, either. I’ll walk you to your office. You need to rest.”

Jess pulled away from him, but his hands tightened. She found no comfort in his touch. In fact, she shrank from it and his offer to help. “Adam, let me go. I don’t want to rest.”

“You’re not thinking clearly.”

She tried to twist away again. “Adam—”

Cole stepped around the bed and pulled Jess out of the man’s grip. “Now who’s making a scene, Jacobsen? The lady said no. Go back to herding people into the valley of death, or whatever you do, and butt out of this. It’s family business.”

Adam’s face reddened with resentment, and more than ever his arrow-shaped nose seemed to be on the verge of touching his mouth. “
You’re
not family.”

“Any way you want to look at it, I’m closer than you. So back off!” Cole didn’t raise his voice, but there was no arguing with the authority it carried. Even though Jessica’s emotions were a jumble of terror and irritation, she felt a sense of relief at Cole’s intervention.

A muscle jumped in Adam’s clenched jaw. His mouth flattened into a tight, white line, and he spun around and walked away.

When he was out of earshot, Cole said, “Jess, you really ought to go home, even for a little while. The women will see to Amy. You’ve said yourself that good nursing is what these people need most.”

She looked at her sister, moaning in her delirium. It was a hard choice to make, but she was tired. “Yes, I suppose. But only for an hour or two.” For a brief moment, she wilted against him, grateful for his strength. Then she saw Fred Hustad and Bert Bauer come in through the back door to collect the dead from the cloakroom they’d turned into a morgue. She knew there were five sheet-wrapped bodies in there.

Straightening at the sight, she whispered, “Cole, please—if—no matter what happens, please don’t let that horrible Bauer man take her. I’ve seen how he treats the—please don’t let him—and Winks is just—” She shook her head, unable to finish the sentence. She’d heard rumors that Bert Bauer had been seen at saloons in Twelve Mile and Fairdale, paying for drinks with pieces of jewelry he claimed to have “found.” There wasn’t much question as to where he’d gotten the goods, although no one had actually come forward to identify a family heirloom that should have been buried with its owner or returned.

His gaze followed hers to watch them carry a corpse outside. “It’s not going to come to that. She’ll get better.”

She reached out and squeezed his wrist with more strength than he would have believed she had. “
No
. You have to promise. I need you make the promise and not break it.”

He looked her straight in the eyes. “I—don’t worry. I’ll take care of it.” His voice sounded as tight as her nerves felt. Satisfied, she let herself lean against him again, just for an instant. In Jess’s dull confusion, she thought she felt his lips brush her forehead. What a nightmarish world this had become—she had to contemplate having Cole bury her sister because the only other people available to do it were a greedy ghoul and a simpleminded alcoholic.

He steered her around the partitions and past the beds of the sick. “Mae, Jess is going home for a bit.” The old woman was pushing a tea cart that held soup bowls and a big kettle of broth for those who were strong enough to eat.

Jessica sensed the gazes of the other volunteers touch upon her and then slide away, as if the women didn’t know what to say. Or perhaps they worried that her misery would seek their company in the sickness of their own kin.

“I’ll watch over Amy,” Mae said, “never you mind. We’ll manage till you get back.” She handed a small, napkin-wrapped bundle to Jessica. “I made you a chicken sandwich. You might not be hungry, but I expect you to eat it. You have to keep up your strength.”

Jess was glad that she and Granny Mae had maintained their tentative truce over the past days and nights. Jess had come to rely on Mae’s sturdy practicality and unflappable calm in the face of emergencies. When both Bright’s and the drugstore had run out of Vicks VapoRub, reflecting a national shortage due to the epidemic, Mae had concocted a reasonable substitute from her own store of essential oils and petroleum jelly.

Jessica believed that Mae had developed a grudging respect for her dedication and hard work. She’d even admitted that not all of Jess’s medical knowledge was bunk. At times, she had felt the older woman watching her. She’d known that Mae was looking for a chance to criticize or seize upon what she thought was a mistake. But at least when she’d questioned her, she’d listened to Jess’s explanations.

Now, Mae shifted a moist-eyed glance to Amy. “You run along and rest for a while. We’ll come for you if there’s an emergency.”

“I’ll give you a ride,” Cole offered.

Gripping her chicken sandwich, Jess wavered, then sighed. “All right.”

She stopped at the desk to take off her apron and pick up her bag, unwilling to leave the leather satchel behind. As they walked out of the building, Jessica caught Adam’s cold glare on them.

Then he made a note on his clipboard.

“Tell me about my boys. Are they all right? Are they well?”

Emmaline sat across from Tanner Grenfell at her wobbly kitchen table. He made the trip up here to Butler Road every couple of months or so to give her reports about Wade and Joshua. She wasn’t sure if it was a kindness or curse, because listening to him only made her miss them more. But she couldn’t quite bring herself to tell Tanner to stop coming around.

Green wood in the stove made for a smoky fire. The smell seeped into everything, but it cut the chill. Although she was fairly isolated up here, word of the epidemic had reached her. She would allow no customer through her door who so much as coughed once or looked the least bit sick. But she couldn’t afford to stop working completely. Business had dropped off as it was, so today she wore a faded print house dress instead of her faded dressing gown.

“They’re just fine, Em, growing like weeds. The schools are closed so they can’t catch the sickness there.”

“Are they good at their classes?”

“Yes. I know you want them to get their book-learning. I’m not much at helping them myself, but Miss Susannah makes sure they keep to their studies. Since she’s been helping at the hospital, though, she won’t let me or the kids into her kitchen. We’re getting by on my cooking in the bunkhouse.” He grinned. “I’m pretty lousy at the stove, too, I guess. Josh says he’s tired of bacon and spuds, but we’re not starving. And I know she’s just being careful.”

“She still doesn’t know about—well, me?”

“Not as far I know. It’s for sure the boys don’t.”

“Do they ever ask about me?”

He glanced away, plainly uncomfortable. “Not so much anymore.”

She propped her chin on her hand and toyed with her package of Lucky Strikes on the table. “After three years I guess they think I gave up on them, just like their worthless father.”

“No, they don’t. I’ve told them what you wanted me to, that I’m their uncle and you’re in a tuberculosis sanitarium in Colorado.” He shrugged. “It leaves the door open if the day ever comes that you want them with you again.”