Mercury's Rise (Silver Rush 04) (12 page)
Prochazka stood up abruptly and his chair almost fell backwards. The marshal caught it with one hand.
“If Mrs. Pace would allow an autopsy to be performed on her husband, we could lay this nonsense to rest,” the doctor said. “I have no time for pandering to this woman, who makes accusations of me. I have patients, I am delayed in attending. Patients requiring attention, who have been…” he seemed to search for the word, “
denied
my treatment this morning and last night because of the fits of a hysterical female.”
Inez frowned, thinking that Mrs. Pace had not acted hysterical during the previous night’s moments of deep crisis. Rather, she had only appeared hysterical after her interview with the doctor and marshal.
“I know Mrs. Pace well,” continued Prochazka. “Have treated her since the beginning of summer. She came here a frail woman, but is now much improved in the matter of her lungs. This mental stress, this maniacal behavior, it is merely a manifestation of her underlying weakness. I must see Mr. Travers now. Nurse Crowson said he is coughing blood again. She has been wheeling him about the garden for the past hour. Do you want a man’s life on your hands for the sake of another who has already met his Maker, thanks to the vagaries of age and the unfortunate twists of circumstances?”
“Whoa, hold your horses, Doc,” said the marshal. “Mrs. Stannert was the last person in the coach. We’re done here. You can return to your patients, and sorry for the trouble.”
While talking, the marshal had advanced around the table and was now motioning Inez to the door. She stood her ground, long enough to let Prochazka know she was not about to be run off, quaking in her boots, fearful of a display of temper.
“Perhaps,” she said coldly. “Mrs. Pace’s display of mental
mania
is no more due to her medical infirmities than this exhibit of rabid
spleen
is due to your poor manners, Doctor.”
With that, she retreated in dignified haste, even as she heard him lapse back into the foreign tongue from the previous night. Strange mutterings followed her. “
Verrückte! Ztráta
č
asu!
Idioti!
”
That last word, at least, was clear to her.
Marshal Robbins closed the door behind them, mopped his brow with a bright red kerchief, and set his bowler atop his head. “Well, Mrs. Stannert. I’d say you woke up the wrong passenger.”
She was shaking with anger. “He’s quite insufferable. What an absolute boor!”
Marshal Robbins squinted up at the back of the hotel, while he tucked his notepad inside his vest. “He’s an odd stick, there’s no doubt. But a powerful healer in these parts, so folks take his stand-offishness with a grain of salt. Too, the nurse, Mrs. Crowson, she’s sound on the goose, real reliable with the sick and ailing. Keeps things on an even keel when the doctor gets wound up and is on the shoot.”
Inez sniffed, and crossed her arms. The marshal started walking back to the hotel, and she matched his stride. “So, that is it?”
He looked at her, wary, a bit bemused. “What’s it?”
“You’re not asking more questions? You are not going to pursue the circumstances of Mr. Pace’s death any further?”
“Now ma’am. I’m not one to pass the buck nor play to the gallery.” He spoke slowly and deliberately, as if to a child. “At the same time, I’m not going to kick up a row where there’s nothing to be gained. Gentleman comes a cropper on the stagecoach out of Leadville. Out of my jurisdiction, but Mr. Lewis says, real desperate-like, can I spare the morning to come down and give the matter some attention. So, I come. I ask questions. I listen to the answers.”
He stopped speaking as Nurse Crowson approached with her charge, wheels clacking and squeaking. He stepped to one side on the gravel path to allow her to pass. Inez did the same. As the nurse headed toward the clinic, she nodded a greeting at the marshal. He ran a finger along the rim of his bowler in acknowledgment.
After nurse and patient had turned the corner, the marshal resumed. “For witnesses, we got a distraught widow, a passel of young’uns, a servant girl who won’t say nothin’ that doesn’t sound like a quote from the Good Book, and that other gal, Miss Carothers, who admits she doesn’t remember what-all because she was too worried about the young’uns and tryin’ to keep them from stampeding into panic. And then, there’s you. I gotta say, Mrs. Stannert, I credit your testimony as observations of the first water, but I also respect Dr. Prochazka as being simon-pure when it comes to matters of doctoring.”
Doctoring. Healing. Tonic.
A sudden thought struck Inez, and she slowed, trying to sort it out. “Marshal. Mr. Pace’s troubles turned deadly right after he drank the bottled tonic. Is it possible, could there have been something more than or different from just the medicine in the bottle?” As she heard herself say the words, the natural conclusion loomed—a storm cloud in a darkening sky. “If that were the case, could the intended victim have been Mrs. Pace, and not her husband?” The thought sent a shiver through her. “Because that would mean she could still be in danger.”
The marshal, who had stopped to hear her out, held up a hand to cut her off. “Whoa, whoa. That’s a pretty wild idea you’ve roped there. No proof, for any of it, and no sense behind it. The bottle was sealed, you said so yourself. Besides, why would anyone want to strike at a woman like her? You’re riding way out in front of the herd. I say it’s time to wind up this business and move along.”
She backpedaled. “Well, perhaps it wasn’t intentional. Maybe it was a mistake. A miscalculation by the doctor or his assistant—too much of this, not enough of that—could be enough to turn a healing draught deadly.”
The marshal, shaking his head, was already moving, putting distance between himself and Inez, as if her odd theories might be some infectious disease that he had no intention of catching. “The doctor does his own tonics. I know that for a fact.”
Inez rolled her eyes. “Tonics, nostrums, sirups. Quackery and flimflammery. Probably all comes down to cheap whiskey and a touch of laudanum.”
“It ain’t like that, ma’am,” he said stubbornly. “Dr. Prochazka’s no quack or purveyor of patent medicines, and he doesn’t make mistakes of the kind you’re suggesting.”
“What makes him such a saint? Did he breathe life back into your lungs and cure you of consumption?”
The marshal stopped again and pinned her with a steely eye. “No ma’am. But my wife was on the point of meetin’ her Maker when we came to Manitou to take the waters out of sheer desperation. The doctor took her in as a charity case. I couldn’t pay his fees on a lawman’s salary. He saved her life. So sure, I suppose you could say he gave me my breath back. Without my Mary, you might as well ready my resting place in the bone orchard. Without her, I would’ve been a goner. My life, over.”
Inez felt a flush rise to her cheeks, his rebuke stinging like a physical slap. “My apologies, Marshal. I didn’t mean to pry. I should not have said all that.”
“No ma’am. I guess you shouldn’t’ve.” He tugged on the brim of his hat, bringing it further down his forehead and shadowing the tightness that had appeared around his eyes. Without waiting for her, he moved briskly through the last of the winding garden path, up the porch stairs to the back veranda of the hotel, and disappeared inside.
Inez shook her head. The bitter scent of some strong herb and the drone of bees in a nearby rosebush filled her head as she tried to collect herself. Birds shrilled, and the temperature, she noticed, had climbed appreciably since her rising just a couple hours earlier.
She was without a hat, having left it in the dining room at the initial summons. The heat weighed heavily, like a clothes iron on a cotton drape, pressing her down.
I should have kept my suspicions to myself. Stepping on the toes of the local law, even inadvertently, was most unwise. I hope I don’t have cause to regret my remarks any further than I do at this moment.
“Inez!”
Harmony’s voice brought Inez out of her guilty reverie. Her sister was coming down the back steps, hurrying toward her. “The children are back! Come. Your son will need to rest soon.” She took Inez’s arm. “We try hard to keep him to the schedule the doctor recommended.” She peered at Inez. “Is something wrong?”
“No, no. It’s…”
I’ve been insulted by that pernicious quack.
I’ve alienated the town’s lawman. I’d give a small fortune for a stiff iced lemonade.
“It’s just so warm,” Inez finished, lamely. “In Leadville, the air isn’t quite so oppressive. So where is William?”
Harmony guided her toward the hotel. “If you think the air here is oppressive, then you have forgotten what it’s like back East in the summertime. Even in Newport, the air is so thick I can barely move when visiting Mama and Papa. The hotel’s children just returned from their morning outing. The hotel is wonderful in keeping them entertained. This morning, Lily and William joined the others on an excursion on the little donkeys, the burros. The sweetest animals, so patient! They are all out in front.”
While talking, Harmony and Inez had walked through the dim interior of the hotel, almost startling in its coolness after the trapped heat in the garden. They emerged onto the front porch. The rocking chairs on the ground-floor veranda were well occupied, and the squeaking of their gliders combined with the general confusion just beyond. The burros huddled, as if by sheer numbers they could prevail against the whistling and urgings of the stable staff to move them along. Inez gathered the stable boys were taking the burros to someplace other than the stables, because surely the pack animals would otherwise be stampeding toward home.
Sweet animals indeed.
Everyone in Leadville knew of the obstinate nature of the beasts, and their simple stubbornness in the face of switch or curse, if they were not inclined.
Mingling with the stable boys’ shouts were the excited and tired voices of the children. Much like the donkeys, the children stood in a pack, with nursemaids, governesses, and nannies hovering, wiping a dusty face here, calming a sobbing girl in a smudged white smock dress there.
Inez cast an anxious eye over the swirling mass of knee-high urchins clinging to older children or adults as she and Harmony moved down the front steps. All of the very youngest children were half hidden in long skirts. She spotted Lily, just as Harmony lifted a hand, and Lily responded. Slowly, Lily, with William in tow, moved out of the crowd.
He was rubbing his eyes with a pudgy fist, leaving dirt smudges across his face as he did so. A straw hat dangled from his neck by a leather string. Inez’s heart was pounding so hard and fast, the crash of blood through her veins seemed to cloud her vision. Unable to wait a moment longer, she rushed toward William and scooped him up in her arms. Inez buried her face in his hair, noticing, as she did so, how it had lightened, how it was now the same golden brown as Mark’s hair. “William, it’s me, your mama.”
William reared back, smacking Inez’s nose with the sudden movement, and screamed as if he was being scalped. Those nearby—adults, children, burros—hushed and stared at the spectacle. William’s booted feet lashed out furiously against her skirts, and he twisted violently, trying to escape, howling the entire time.
Shocked, Inez nearly dropped the wiggling bundle of fury that was her son. Even as she attempted to grapple with his physical and verbal rejection, the observation flashed through her mind: There’s certainly nothing wrong with his lungs right now!
Lily rushed forward, arms open wide. William screamed, snot running down toward his mouth, and held his arms out to her in return. He tilted dangerously, sliding from Inez’s grasp. Inez felt as if she’d grabbed a wild cougar cub instead of the child of her own flesh and blood.
Lily snatched the toddler from Inez, saying with vehemence, “He doesn’t know you! You scared him!” She turned away from Inez, as if shielding William with her body. “Shhh, shhh, little Wilkie,” she cooed. “Lily’s here. Lily’s here.”
Inez wrapped her empty arms around herself, in an unfilled hug, staring at Lily’s back. Her snuffling offspring peered at her over Lily’s shoulder. His eyes, lashes plastered together by tears, were suspicious, fearful replicas of the ones she saw in her mirrored reflection every day. She felt as if her heart had been ripped from its cage of bone and trampled in the dirt.
“Wilkie?” She sounded out the unfamiliar nickname. “His name is William!”
Harmony hurried up to her, saying, “What with Jonathan’s brother William, his son Will, our stable boy Billy, and the D’Andelots next door with their little
Guillaume
, it just seemed prudent to give him a nickname.”
“You might have told me.”
William had turned his head away. One cheek now lay against Lily’s shoulder, one arm dangling. The other was curled around her neck, the chubby fist gripping a long mousey strand of Lily’s hair that had escaped her bonnet in back. Lily bounced him slightly, soothing him with a low murmur.
Harmony flushed. “It was an oversight. In our letters, you always referred to him as William, and I, I just followed suit without thinking.”
“He doesn’t remember me.” Inez hardly could say the words.